HP offering Samsung Solid-State Drives on ProLiant G6 Servers

InformationWeek.com reports today that HP will be offering Samsung's 60 and 120 GB solid-state drives (SSDs) as an option across all HP ProLiant G6 rack, tower and blade servers. They will also offer the SSDs with select G5 servers.

While they are significantly more expensive, SSDs offer lower power usage while adding the advantages of better performance and reliability -- arguably lowering costs over time.

HP VP of marketing Jim Ganthier said in a statement that combining Samsung's SSD technology with HP ProLiant servers "delivers energy-efficient server platforms to enable customers to slash their power usage and reduce costs."

According to the article, SSDs are the best bet for high-performance applications including "video-on-demand, virtualization, Web serving and online transaction processing. ...Because SSDs cost much more than HDDs and have far less storage capacity."

For more information on the power consumption and performance of SSDs, visit the entire InformationWeek.com story here. They also offer an independent report on the state of enterprise storage (registration required).

Starting in May of 2009, IBM also began offering SSDs with its Power6 processors.