Solid-state drives come of age

SanDisk unveiled a new technology it calls ExtremeFFS, short for Extreme Flash File System, at the WinHEC conference in Los Angeles this week. What ExtremeFFS brings to the table is an architecture where all of the NAND flash memory channels behave independently, with some reading and others writing. This makes it suitable for Windows Vista, which requires a large quantity of random writes.

With this in mind, it is no wonder that SanDisk made the bold assertion that the performance of SSDs will improve by "a factor of four" in 2009 over that of the current generation of SSDs. The release of this new generation of SSDs would literally signify the coming-of-age of the SSD.

The pace of progress in enterprise technology is also relentless elsewhere. Even as AMD gears up for the official launch its new Shanghai processors next week, we hear news of a joint demonstration with Linux vendor, Red Hat. The duo put on a demonstration of a live migration of virtual machines. So, what is so interesting about this? Well, the demonstration showed migration on virtual machines, between systems that were running on different processors.

While nothing more than a demonstration at this point--indeed, a lot more work needs to be done--this can only be good news to enterprises. The future of virtualization looks even brighter, with the possibility that companies no longer need to be locked in to specific brands and architectures. - Paul