Companies in the medical equipment manufacturing and healthcare services verticals have a particular need for fast, reliable storage. As their embedded applications become more complex and demanding, it will be imperative that organizations in these sectors upgrade legacy magnetic storage to industrial-caliber SSD drives that can process heavy workloads without failing or succumbing to extreme environmental conditions.

With DIGISTOR Industrial SSD Drives, enterprises can address this need for high-performance, durable and speedy storage. DIGISTOR's SSDs are a perfect match for complex network environments in which numerous appliances, workstations and servers must operate flawlessly and in concert. Using an advanced BCH ECC algorithm, these SSDs provide far superior data protection and error correction than the HDDs still in wide use, ensuring that machines operate at optimal capacity and have the resources required to run cutting-edge software.

New medical technologies require fast, durable storage
Medical software, especially for embedded solutions, is becoming more complex. In a white paper, "Controlling Software Complexity," Coverity executives Ben Chelf and Andy Chou examined the trend toward increasingly elaborate applications across a number of verticals, as businesses try to streamline processes and improve quality control.

"A range of market sectors, including consumer electronics, defense, automotive, avionics, telecommunications and medical devices have new, heightened appetites for embedded multi-threaded software to take advantage of multi-core hardware," the report stated. "According to industry sources, the amount of embedded software doubles every 8 months, placing a premium on software performance."

While the Coverity team examined the obstacles that will impede software developers as a result of this trend, IT executives and engineers face similarly serious challenges in ensuring that their networks have the infrastructure to support advanced applications. Industrial SSDs and flash storage will be vital IT hardware components in these sectors since they offer rapid access to data, ample resources for applications and low rates of failure and error.

One healthcare organization's experience switching from HDDs to SSDs
Despite the rapid evolution of software and networking technologies, many enterprises have not invested in industrial SSDs yet. However, TechTarget's Carol Sliwa recently made the case that flash storage may be becoming gradually more popular, even with smaller and more budget-conscious enteprises.

Sliwa looked at one organization, Delaware Health and Social Services, that was in the midst of assessing its systems' readiness for the new applications that it must deploy under law. Ultimately, it may need to shift from HDDs to SSDs in order to ensure compliance.

"Our Tier 1 right now is just 15,000 rpm drives," said Delaware Health and Social Services technologist Ron Wilson. "A lot more SQL databases and an increased need for performance with these new applications may drive the need for us to go SSD."

Delaware Health and Social Services may not be alone in gravitating toward SSDs. Sliwa cited a recent IDC survey revealed that more than 70 percent of IT managers planned to utilize SSDs within the next year, as well as a separate study from TheInfoPro estimating that SSD and flash cache storage procurement could grow as much as 36 percent in 2013.