Coping with the global financial crisis, companies are concentrating on higher efficiency with short-term strategies. Corporate budgets are being cut and in many cases, IT spend is an all too-vulnerable component of these reductions.

This corporate financial cloud poses a dilemma for any CIO or IT manager. Beyond cutbacks, increasing competitive pressure, new network applications and a changing customer base are also market realities, bringing conflicting pressures for increased IT support. CIOs and IT managers must expand the performance and capacity of their data centers, while holding the line on the budget, or even reducing it.

The most talked about way to achieve this today is through the use of solid state drives (SSDs) for server storage. Just like our migration from the gas guzzling cars of the past to more economical energy vehicles today, IT data center storage must reinvent itself to keep up with rising energy and real estate costs, or continue to bleed needless red ink.

Today, storage solutions have begun to stratify into "performance optimized" and "capacity optimized" solutions. Once this premise is understood, IT managers will be looking to solid state drives (SSD) for performance optimization, and to high density, low-power hard disk drives (HDD) for capacity optimization.