Will you look at that. The storage option that jacks up the price on that notebook/netbook you've had your eye on is making a play for enterprise storage systems.

Seems like a no-brainer. Lower power requirements, faster data access... what's not to like?

The price, that's what.

Don't mind that, however. You're paying a small fortune on that storage array anyway. Sun this week unveiled that it was cramming solid-state drives (SSDs) into its Unified Storage Appliance (Sun Storage 7410) to improve performance and keep critical data at the ready.

Somehow overlooked was startup Violin Memory (blame Sun's glare). According to InternetNews, they have an all-flash appliance.

The Violin 101 Flash Module, available in a 2U chassis, comes with 4TB of Flash storage capacity. It also can be configured to support up to 504 GB of DRAM -- for enterprises in need of far faster speeds, at the cost of capacity. The appliance includes four 4Gbit/sec Fibre Channel connections and up to four 10Gbit/sec Ethernet ports.

But it's not cheap. The 2TB Violin system costs in the neighborhood of $120,000. And it has to win over some skeptics. That's because 15K drives, while comparatively less energy efficient, didn't earn their enterprise-class reputations for just showing up to the party.

...But Krishna Chander, senior analyst with iSupply, begs to differ on some of these claims. For starters, he has never heard of high failure rates for 15,000 RPM drives; instead he says they have the same failure rates as other drives.

The real shortcoming for SSDs is their write performance. Major datacenter OEMs tell Chander SSD can't match the 15k drives. "It's not prime time yet for fast writes at this point," he told InternetNews.com. "The OEMs are saying they got a ways to go. But they are certainly considering them and certainly deploying them in high-read applications."

Looks like we'll be wrestling with this for a while, at least until flash prices tumble to within firing range of traditional, platter-based drives. Then, the real pew-pew begins...