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Fowler, executive vice president of systems at Sun Microsystems, and other company executives on June 4 are announcing that OEMs will integrate SSDs (solid state disks) with the bulk of its hardware and software offerings, and will also build services around helping customers embrace and deploy the Flash technology.

Sun later this year will roll out its own SSDs designed to give users jumps in application performance and scalability while cutting energy consumption and costs.

In a meeting here with several analysts and reporters June 3, Fowler said that given the demands being placed on server and storage systems by new technologies such as faster processors, it’s only a matter of time before businesses start turning to SSDs. For Fowler, it’s more a question of “when” than “if.”

“Flash today is not about bulk storage … but it’s about performance,” Fowler said. “The question for us is going to be adoption rate … because people’s adoption rates of storage is really variable.”

He expects the adoption to begin in earnest later this year, starting mostly with businesses running high-performance computing environments and I/O-intensive applications. Soon after that, more mainstream enterprises will grab hold of SSDs.

When that happens, Sun wants to be there, Fowler said. The company will begin to deliver 2.5-inch Flash drives and SSD-based products by the second half of 2008, with 3.5-inch drives coming after that.

The company also already is designing servers in-house that use SSDs, and will continue that trend toward enabling Flash technology of its products over the next few years.