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The cloud-based fully managed NoSQL database service Amazon launched Wednesday stores data on Solid State Drives (SSDs).

SSDs are considered superior in performance to spinning disk but a lot more expensive, making their use in most data centers cost prohibitive. Analysts, however, forecast that a number of factors currently in place position the SSD market for growth from 2011 through 2015.

DynamoDB, Amazon’s new database service, stores data on SSDs and replicates it synchronously across multiple data centers. This ensures higher availability of the data.

Werner Vogels, Amazon CTO, said the company had been grappling with database scalability, performance and cost-effectiveness challenges for more than 15 years.

“Amazon DynamoDB is the result of everything we’ve learned from building large-scale, non-relational databases for Amazon.com and building highly scalable and reliable cloud computing services at AWS,” he said.

DynamoDB is designed for enterprise applications with its ability to scale to enterprise needs and its rapid performance regardless of database size, Vogels said.

Analysts from the market research firm IDC reported a 105% increase in the size of the SSD market between 2010 and 2011 and predicted continued expansion in 2012 and beyond. The global SSD market’s revenue reached US$5bn in 2011, up from $2.4bn in 2010, IDC said.

In a blog post, Intel veteran Rick Johnson, wrote that the question of widespread adoption of SSDs in the data center was really, “how much longer will hard disk drives still be a viable option?”

Forrester analyst Andrew Reichman said SSD technology was “poised to play a big role in enterprise storage due to its high-performance, stateful nature and moderate cost, compared with DRAM.”

Reichman warned, however, that while all major storage vendors had “shoehorned” SSDs into existing disk-based architectures, there were several issues with the approach not so readily resolved. The main one is traffic bottlenecks and the proposed solution for it has been automated tiering for storing only certain performance-hungry types of data on SSDs.

There are, however, multiple “emerging vendors” whose products are designed for SSD from the ground up and that challenge the notion that tiering and spinning disk are still necessary components in storage.