The Smart Data Placement tools enable users to migrate, monitor and dynamically place data on SSDs, Barrera said. They are available immediately and come free with each server or with the company's storage systems management software.

"Think of it as a two-step process," Barrera said. "There's a process of measurement -- tools tell you what's happening and what benefit there'll be from data being on SSD. And then there's separate tools to migrate that data."

For example, in conjunction with SSDs in Power iSeries servers, IBM said it will now also offer the "IBM i: ASP Balancer," which will allow system administrators to monitor data, migrate data and properly place it on the SSDs to achieve the best performance in a tiered-storage environment. While the ASP Balancer is not new, the code is now upgraded to deliver data monitoring and migration capabilities for SSDs.

The SSD Data Balancer tools allow a system administrator to move "hot" data that's frequently accessed to SSDs, while "cold" data goes to traditional hard drives. That approach recognizes that most customers will have a hybrid environment using both SSDs and traditional disks.

In another example, IBM's Data Facility Storage Management Subsystem (DFSMS) provides for targeted data placement on SSDs in an IBM zSeries server and DS8000 storage array.