The company is offering SSDs that customers can slide into their storage bays, and in the future will plans to integrate them onto the server motherboard itself to provide faster data access for I/O intensive applications, said Michael Cornwell, lead technologist of flash memory at Sun. This could mark a change in how Sun servers are designed going forward, he said.

The company announced Wednesday that it is now offering Intel's 32GB X25-E Extreme SSD which customers can slide into their servers. Priced starting at US$1,199, the drive will be available in a 2.5-inch module that fits into 14 models of Sun Fire servers and Sun Storage 7000 systems.

Longer term the company hopes to locate SSDs closer to the server CPUs to speed up tasks like processing Web 2.0 and database applications, Cornwell said. Bringing SSDs into the server will cut the bottleneck that occurs when today's powerful, multicore CPUs have to wait for data to be delivered from hard drives, Cornwell said.

Solid-state drives, or SSDs, store data on flash memory chips and are emerging as an alternative to hard drives, which store data on spinning magnetic platters. SSDs offer faster read-and-write capabilities, but are still generally more expensive to purchase. Sun said last year that it would offer SSDs in most of its servers by the middle of 2009.

Ideally, data centers will use a hybrid of SSDs attached to servers and hard drives in centralized storage systems, Cornwell said. Hard drives provide better long-term storage for large volumes of data, but SSDs can be located between the central storage system and the CPU to provide quick access to data that is currently being processed.