We recently decided to beef up a solution's storage platform. What would have been a simple process just a few months earlier — select a storage subsystem, whether it be NAS, SAN, or DAS, and then populate it with a bundle of drives to meet the performance and space needs — became a serious quandary. We're still in limbo, unsure what to do.

Should we bother paying out big dollars for arrays of magnetic drives, or should we push the envelope and go with an array of SSDs? Should we wait a while? Will our vendors and the storage systems support this technology? Will existing products make optimal use of it? Will the SSDs burn out under our usage models?

Dell, for instance, still has nary a mention of SSDs in their servers and storage products site. Their reps still telling you that SSDs are unsupported.

Yet the evidence is obvious that in the year ahead SSDs are going to absolutely annihilate the existing field of storage vendors. Suddenly "outsiders" like Intel (not really known for storage products) and Fusion-Io are the leaders, and are making the existing market look like a bunch of chumps. Paying big dollars for a large array of magnetic drives seems like a choice that will certainly yield some serious buyer's regret a few months down the line.

SSDs change everything.

In a similar way, the extraordinary advances in JavaScript over the past year have completely changed the scope of what a "web application" could entail, and we as developers still haven't fully come to realize what this means. Opera, Webkit, Tracemonkey, and now, jumping to a big lead, the supercharged V8 engine of Chrome 2 (I have some serious misgivings about Google's browser given that it's the product of an ad company, but it is uncontestably becoming a real contender. I will warn that on the Chrome download page linked before this parenthetical aside, they put the agreement to send...cough...anonymous statistics in exactly the position where people have habitually learned to click to agree to the ToS), the advances have been truly spectacular.

Exciting times ahead. These innovations aren't simply evolutionary, but change the scope and rules of the game.