1 big market lesson and 4 shining technology companies showing the way ahead for all SSD and memory systems


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1 big market lesson and 4 shining technology companies showing the way ahead for all SSD and memory systems

In 2016 4 shining companies - Diablo, Marvell, NVMdurance and Symbolic IO provided significant technology markers for the way ahead for the SSD memory systems ecosystem.

by Zsolt Kerekes, editor - StorageSearch.com - December 20, 2016

If you're trying to understand the SSD and memory systems markets and looking for a single big idea which gives you a confident feel for what's going on - then you'll be disappointed if you stare too hard and look in the expected places.

Unlike past years you won't find the answer in any single interface, memory technology or startup company.

In past years we could (and often did) identify - as the SSD news stories unfolded - that there were bright candles which provided clarity to how SSD adoption strategies would emerge with examples coming from particular angles and hinting at plausible multigenerational roadmaps:-

the implicit assumption of SSD accelerators in every new enterprise server - due to ground breaking business development by Fusion-io with PCIe SSDs (2007 to 2009).

the creeping realization and acceptance that every new kind of naughty flash memory would one day be usable in the enterprise (once the storage market accepted the role play of DWPD

the growing influence of the baby in the basket SSD software market (whose strong wailing for attention touched wouldbe early adopters in 2009)

the SSD aware operational and utilization efficiencies which could only work best at rack and cloud level

the re-imagination of server RAM

and the performance possibilities of in-situ processing - in all its many diverse and still emerging forms.

In 2016 - if you can say there is a single big idea in the SSD and memory market which reaches out everywhere - I would say it's this.

The SSD and memory systems market is now a self-aware interconnected ideas ecosystem in which the detailed implementation of new advanced technologies has to take into account the big data and big controller architecture ideas in all the other parts of this new SSD aware ecosystem.

And in this new market paradigm - management complexity at the micro level and the ability to have intelligent flow control symmetry which has been enabled by the flattening of read latency costs spanning across many previously hard banded tiers - is enabling utilization rates of installed data infrastructure which are vastly more efficient than legacy enterprise architectures which were heavily optimized to hide the latency weaknesses of hard drive based systems rather than optimized to support native application based data query flows.

You can see the effects everywhere.

Or nowhere depending how you interpret what you see in the news and market reports.

This is a business phenomenon rather than a technology shift, But it affects all technology business plans.

The difficulty of this lack of a single technology focus point (instead everything seems to be hot) is like the difficulty of seeing the wood for the trees.

It's much easier to demonstrate how some of these interconnected ideas interact with each other in business stories (like I tried to do with the story below - a winter's tale of SSD market influences). And I'll be using similar stories to show the interconnectedness of this new SSD market paradigm in my writing next year.

Of course this doesn't mean to say that there aren't worthy new hot technologies too. As to what they are? You probably have your own ideas.

And to get a wide trawl I asked a bunch of people in the SSD industry for their suggestions and you can see what they said in this article - what were the big SSD memory architecture ideas in 2016?

4 SSD companies which made me stop and think

4 shining companies which made me stop and think

Companies matter too.

For me - the SSD ecosystems companies which made me sit up and take notice - because of the promise of better prospects for the SSD market implied by something new they did in 2016 were:-

NVMdurance - who confirmed long standing suspicions that the endurance motherlode of flash memory had only previously been scraped by previous controller technologies.

Symbolic IO - who hinted that all the calculations which have traditionally been done related to storage capacity and performance give you the wrong expectations of what you can expect to get from memory systems enhanced architecture - if you can find a way to embed data packing transparently into the memory system. (We'll learn more about the details I hope in 2017.)

Diablo Technologies - who showed that if you integrate motherboard DRAM and software into the controller thinking of "flash as RAM" - then enterprise server workloads don't stress flash based NVDIMMs as much as you might have thought when extrapolating from storage SSD based RAM emulation previously done in the market.

Marvell - who (with their FLC technology) confirmed that even battery powered embedded products like phones should now aspire to reap the "flash as RAM" benefits which had been pioneered in big memory enterprise systems.

And while we're on the subject of interesting SSD companies I recently published the new Q3 2016 edition of the Top SSD Companies which is based on the crowd sourced intelligence of readers here on StorageSearch.com.

This is the 38th quarterly edition and sometimes when I look back at past editions I am impressed by how well the SSD industry has changed so much from being a small and disruptive influence in a corner of the data systems market and had now grown to confidently sit at the center of everything that matters.

Although many SSD CEOs I talk to ask how their companies are doing in these lists - and want to know if they are moving up or down - another way of extracting useful lookahead pointers from it is to see which companies have entered the list for the first time.

In 2016 the newcomers to the Top SSD Companies were:- Hyperstone, Mangstor, Memblaze, Netlist, NVMdurance, NxGn and SymbolicIO.

We've heard interesting things from these companies before - and it now seems certain that whatever they may do in 2017 will attract more attention.

2016 in the SSD and memory systems market was a year of growing confidence that no apologies or deference are any longer due to the older related markets of processors, and rotating media storage. The only market which SSD product plans need to adapt to and compete with are within the SSD market itself. And this market has big enough potential to make difficult efforts worthwhile.

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Locality and latency are well understood related concepts in the design of tiered memory and caches.

Before 2016 business models in the SSD market had something similar.

Markets like military, consumer and enterprise were only loosely coupled and the flow of product leadership ideas from one to the other often took years. So too with form factors. Companies were known for the safe form factor fences inside of which their star product management plans were hatched and success was assured. (Chip, drive, box, software...)

No longer! Self awareness in the SSD and memoryfication market fabric has spun new tunneling effects in business strategies which now have the potential to instantly hop across segments with infinite improbability.

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DRAM's reputation for speed is like the old story about the 15K hard drives (more is not always quickest or best)

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Everything in storage changed in the past decade due to the disruptive impact of SSDs and SSD aware software.

Now everything in memories and storage and processing is set to change again and branch into different directions leveraging on the confidence that when you have memory everywhere you can do things differently.

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SCM, NVDIMM-X, NVMf etc...

what were the big SSD, storage and memory architecture ideas which emerged and came into sharp focus in 2016?

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Many of the important and sometimes mysterious behavioral aspects of SSDs which predetermine their application limitations and usable market roles can only be understood when you look at how well the designer has dealt with managing the symmetries and asymmetries which are implicit in the underlying technologies which are contained within the SSD.

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a winter's tale of SSD market influences

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1 big market lesson and 4 shining technology companies showing the way ahead for all SSD and memory systems

4 shining companies which made me stop and think

Also in 2016 these companies entered the Top SSD Companies List for the first time:- Hyperstone, Mangstor, Memblaze, Netlist, NxGn and Symbolic IO.