IDG News Service — Though flash storage could be the most powerful tool yet for IT administrators who want to speed up access to frequently used data, reaping its benefits may require automation software that has just begun to emerge from the major storage vendors.

Flash storage devices such as SSDs (solid-state disks) can bring up a given bit of data faster than HDDs (hard disk drives) because they can get to it without spinning a disk. Though much faster than HDDs at reading, they tend to offer less advantage in writing data, and all this comes at a much greater per-bit cost. So solid state is not expected to replace spinning disks, but to sit alongside them and handle only certain kinds of data.

There are two main ways to use flash, depending on an organization's needs. Both take up less space and energy than other arrangements for fast storage, such as spreading a relatively small amount of data across several HDDs to shorten access times.

Inserted directly in a server, flash can form a second tier of data cache below DRAM, an arrangement that will automatically hold on to the most accessed bits until use of those bits declines and they go down to disk storage. In the form of SSDs, flash becomes the top layer of the permanent storage system.

SSDs are worth it if they are dedicated to data that's read frequently, such as information in a database or popular multimedia content. But what's most often used and what's currently popular can change over time, and not all the data in a particular LUN (logical unit number) may qualify. So storage vendors are working on how to find the most active, or "hot," data and move it into the flash tier of the data center.

IBM officials last week disclosed some details of that company's plans in the area. It's developing a system called Automatic Data Relocation, which can identify the more active parts of a LUN and move them to flash storage, while assigning other data to HDDs. Enterprise policies will also come into play in those decisions. The software should become available for IBM's DS8000 storage array in the first half of next year and for its Storage Virtualization Center platform in the second half, according to Chris Saul, IBM's marketing manager for storage virtualization.

EMC is developing its own automated tiering system, FAST (Fully Automated Storage Tiering), which will go on sale later this year and gain sub-LUN parsing capability in the middle of next year. Compellent Technologies was a pioneer in automating data movement and already has a system with sub-LUN capability.

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