Sun Microsystems has promised to introduce solid state hard drives across much of its server range.

John Fowler, vice president of the systems group at Sun, said that he expects to have solid state drives in most of the company's servers, including small systems and much larger data centre systems.

There is a significant price differential between Flash and platter hard drives, but Sun believes that this will shrink rapidly. Flash prices are dropping an average of 60 per cent per year.

Sun will also release a new version of Solaris optimised for Flash drives by the end of 2008.

No pricing information has been released as yet, but Sun said that the drives will be offered to leading customers on a 60-day trial basis at first.

Seagate and Lenovo have both bet that SSD technology will be key to the future of computing.

However, analysts warn that the technology will not be mature enough for commercial use for another five years and that there are already doubts over its reliability.