The professional blog of Christopher Randel

I’ve been given a pretty unique opportunity to be able to shape an ad campaign for one of the clients my current company is doing work for.  This company is trying to get the word out about their solid-state disks, because really no-one knows they make them. They are actually a pretty decent product, though I worry that Samsung and Intel’s offerings will blow them out of the water price-wise, warranty-wise, and speed-wise.

Check my latest email about it, with edits for privacy.

Heyo.

I’ve replied to your questions as below. Feel free to ask me any other questions.

>>  We are thinking about building a search campaign around the idea that SSD saves energy costs and power consumption and I thought your opinion would be valuable.

It’s not a bad idea, but I think most people like me know the benefits of SSD already, that is, Energy savings on one magnitude ++ or better than traditional HDD.

However I haven’t really seen anyone do a whole green initiative for SSD in datacenters being some crazy energy saving thing.

>>  Do you think people in the industry search for these things?  If so what do you think they look for?

People in the industry might search, but they might click, and would definitely want to read case studies or real world examples, not just numbers and figures.
It’s going to be even more challenging because the general populace, let alone high-end datacenter managers don’t “trust” or think ******** for storage needs yet. Further,

storage needs for SSD’s are a more limited view, because the niche where SSD’s fit really nicely in an enterprise class environment is a very small one.

It’s going to be even more difficult because I’ve been explained that ideally, ******* wants to replace existing 2.5″ drives for enterprise class server environments to sell thousands of these at a time, and really thats rather difficult. I think you’re looking at a pretty small market of people who want to replace thousands of existing disks with SSD’s

Instead people who will buy thousands of these disks will want to buy them in some sort of SAN enclosure, or some sort of SAN/DAS/NAS product that Dell, HP, or some other “large” and well established company sells. If you could get a Dell SAN with ****** SSD’s in it on dell’s website, with a decent warranty replacement for failed SSD, and with that it had an energy efficiency study and case studies with real world examples, that would sell. Breaking into Dell like that is probably nearly impossible, but I think for success ****** would have to partner with someone to create a product like that. They could probably partner with supermicro for the chassis, and a company like Coraid, you could have a product that really fits a niche nicely.

– Christopher