Increasing Productivity and Lowering TCO When Switching To SSDs (IDF 2011)

At Intel Developer Forum 2011, Intel has been touting the advantages that consumers and businesses can have by switching over to SSDs. While consumers might be quick to look just at the performance improvements, businesses are looking at things ranging from the costs to upgrade to the savings from productivity boosts. As it turns out there are many advantages from a cost-savings standpoint to switch to a solid-state drive.

At Intel Developer Forum 2011, Intel has been touting the advantages that consumers and businesses can have by switching over to SSDs. While consumers might be quick to look just at the performance improvements, businesses are looking at things ranging from the costs to upgrade to the savings from productivity boosts. As it turns out there are many advantages from a cost-savings standpoint to switch to a solid-state drive.

Using Intel’s Client IT Total Cost of Ownership Tool, users can either use provided baseline cost estimates or change the information depending how they value certain aspects in their business. The main purpose of the tool is to give a clear printout of what areas they can save money when switching to SSDs.

One of the main points brought up is the difference in reliability between a standard hard drive and SSD. Given the solid-state nature of flash media, there are no moving parts to break from accidental damage or to wear out in the general sense of a mechanical component. This can give businesses a huge advantage by lowering IT costs per system deployed. Using the supplied default values (which may vary between companies or industries) the estimated savings are huge:

Intel estimates that business can save up to $369 per system by switching to an SSD over the three-year life of each notebook. While the tool might not be perfect, it does point out that going off of estimated or known failure rates, there can be considerable savings when switching to SSDs. This doesn’t even go into power consumption, which can also lower costs compared to traditional storage devices. We suggest you give the tool a shot and play around with the default numbers to see how migrating to SSDs can help (or not help) your business.

Discuss This Article