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WipeMASSter Disk Sanitizers erazes 9 disks to Dod standards at hardware speed

WipeMASSter Hard Disk Sanitizers
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the Top 10 SSD OEMs in Q3 2007

Editor:- October 1, 2007 - STORAGEsearch.com today published a new edition of - "the Top 10 Solid State Disk OEMs."

Covering the quarter ending September 30, 2007 - there's a new #1, and a newcomer to the list. ...read the article

the big shrink...

Gigabyte per Second Terabyte Solid State Disks

Terabyte class solid state disks with multi gigabyte per second sustained throughput have been around since February 2003 as datacenter acceleration rackmounts. The best known example being the Tera-RamSan from Texas Memory Systems.

Despite the high price tag of such systems ($1 million in 2003 and still somewhat North of $100K) many enterprises have been delighted to discover that these products have offered enterprise wide application speedups across hundreds of servers - at a much lower cost than traditional disk based storage arrays - as published in numerous case studies.

It has been nice for the rest of us mere mortals (and that includes mouse mortals not just the human variety) to learn about such products, but just as most of us don't have our own personal jet, the ultra fast Terabyte SSD has not been a technology that has affected our everyday lives.

But that will change, a lot sooner than you may think.

2 recent news stories suggest that it won't be too many years we see such a product appearing as a single 3.5" flash SSD. It will initially cost over $10,000 - but will be on a steeply declining semiconductor cost curve - and may drop to as little as $1,000 by 2012.

This prediction is solidly based on extrapolating 2 separate announcements from STEC and MOSAID. In case you missed them, here's a summary.

In April STEC, Inc announced a 512GB solid state drive aimed at video-on-demand services.

In May MOSAID Technologies Inc. unveiled its HyperLink NAND Flash memory architecture which delivers sustained read and write bandwidth up to 800MB/s (10x higher than conventional flash) using existing technology.

The fastest 3.5" SSD available today sustains 190MB/S and has a Fibre-channel interface. Although this device (made by Curtis) is a RAM based SSD it points to the fact that even in the current state of the market the conventional hard disk interfaces such as SATA (which are not stretched by rotating magnetic film technology) will have to get a move on if they are to keep up with the bandwidth demands of high end SSDs.

Now's the time to start planning what you will do with the future generation of ultrafast flash SSDs. It's going to change what species live in the server farm.

See also:- Squeak! - Who's Eating Whom in the Storage Market?, Squeak! - Animal Brands and Metaphors in the Storage Market

Nibble:- Don't be Taken in by Blu Ray vs DVD Sophistry

News stories from vendors are a valuable source of market information - but they can sometimes create a misleading expectation of what could happen when they talk about predicting technology trends.

Vendors understandably talk up their market's growth prospects by citing optimistic analyst predictions. The reason is that most buyers are cautious and don't want to be the first to get burned by the bugs in a new technology. By suggesting that a new market will be very big, or will grow very fast, or has already reached a critical mass - vendors hope that buyers will be more confident and move faster along the new technology adoption curve.

I can tell you from decades of tracking such technology predictions that they often turn out to be as inaccurate as getting an opinion from your pet dog or cat. But until markets become established so that it's possible to track revenue or other historic data - comparing crystal ball images is as good as it gets - and makes for interesting editorial too.

Take the case of what's happening now in the consumer optical storage market.

A simple search on Google shows that many editors and analysts have bought into the market model currently being pushed by manufacturers who are recycling the "Betamax versus VHS" legend as an analog for the "High Definition DVD versus Blu Ray" market.

It's a seductive argument (for both sides) because it leads you down a tunnel in which you are left thinking that the future of buying and storing big globs of portable entertainment has to be one or the other. But that's not necessarily so.

Instead of the Betamax / VHS case study so beloved by commentators I'd like to call to your attention another old (and mostly forgotten) but more recent example - which is much closer to home - the battle of the Super Floppies.

What seemed at stake in the mid 1990s was:- what format would replace the 3.5" floppy drive? - an appendage which once adorned hundreds of millions of PCs.

Competing for attention were several incompatible formats by Iomega, Samsung and Sony. As we now know none of these royal claimants took possession of the floppy throne. Instead a republic was declared.

Most people found out they could exchange information much more conveniently using email instead of thin plastic wallets. And software publishers found that CDs were a more appropriate form of software distribution rather than boxed sets of floppies. The floppy drive slot was replaced by a CD and then later DVD drive - and not by a super floppy drive.

Fast forward to today's digital entertainment storage and distribution market (which is the setting for the Blu Ray vs HD DVD debates.

The simplest way to sell content is via the internet.

The simplest way to store hundreds of movies on a single storage device is on a single big hard disk.

I wrote an article saying something similar back in 2004 - and neither the appearance of holographic storage nor UDO etc has changed my view.

True - a lot of boxes will get sold with slots which are compatible with shiny looking coated plastic disks in the next few years - but there's a significant probability that the Super Optical market could soon go the way of the Super Floppies - and that neither Blu Ray nor HD DVD have a long future.

Nibble:- What's So Important About Storage?

You know what it's like when you meet people for the first time at a social gathering - or get to do catch-up with some distant friends or relations you haven't seen for a year or so - and they ask "what do you do?" or "what are you doing now?"

That's a big question. I think - How much time have you got? - The answer is much easier when the other person is involved with some kind of technology. Fortunately a lot of my friends do work in the computer industry. The knowledgeable ones tease me by saying "Are you still doing that Sun stuff?" - as if referring to some kind of harmful addictive narcotic. Well - maybe they're right - considering how things turned out. A lot of companies didn't survive close contact with that SPARC stuff I used to babble about. But I kicked the habit 8 years ago - when I started this storage site.

"I cover the storage market now" - I say.

"What's so important about storage? - Isn't that disk drives and CDs?"

I want to say - "It's the most important part of the whole computer market. More important than servers. More important than processor chips. More important than who wins in the Linux / Windows / Solaris (whoops - the odd flashback still comes out) - debate."

But then I think back to earlier conversations I have had on this - "what do you do for a living - and what's so important about xxx" - theme?

In the late 1970s - the subject was microprocessors. I was an electronics engineer keen to explain to anyone who wanted to know (and looking back now - probably most didn't want to know in the detail I gave them) about why processors were so important - the differences between the various types - and the peripheral chipsets, development tools, problems of in-circuit emulators when the product you were designing worked with the Intel ICE - but stopped working - when you unplugged the ICE and replaced it with the real chip.

"Am I boring you?" - I'd ask after 20 minutes explaining to a nurse friend at a party - why a multiplexed address data bus reduced the pin count - and gave the option of either a smaller PCB footprint or additional on-board functions like timers and I/O. But nurses work long hours and can sleep while standing - so no harm was done.

After I had developed my social skills a little more - I realized that the best answer to give to the question "why are microprocessors so important?" - when asked at a party in 1978 or so - was "Less people will be needed to work in factories and chemical plants. Microprocessors will replace a lot of operators - and do their jobs better."

My tact had not advanced as much as my social skills. This was when I was living in an area surrounded by chemical plants, coal mines, steel works etc - which employed most of the people in the local towns. But I was designing the first generation of factory and process automation equipment - with the confidence of youth - I knew that would all change. And the new technology was giving me a job. "They would smile - and say "not in my lifetime." It was unimaginable. But it happened anyway. Quicker than even I thought.

Later reincarnations of the "what's so important about" question varied with my career over the next few decades. When I worked in the defense market - I used to say - "Do you remember in Superman - when they ask - Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No - it's Superman! - Well our side (the good guys) will know. A lot sooner than the bad guys."

Looking back - I have sometimes understated the impact of new technologies.

I think all of us - who were working in the web economy in 1995 / 96 - knew it was going to have a big effect on the economy. But despite the hype of the dotcom boom - the real effect on how businesses are run - how you decide where to eat or stay when travelling - how entertainment is promoted and delivered - how you buy your catfood and groceries when you don't have time to go to the shops - has penetrated deeper into everyday life than I imagined it would when I started publishing online.

Back to the question of - What's this storage stuff? - and - Why is it so important? - which I get asked a lot nowadays.

If the person I'm talking to - works with enterprise computing - I usually say something like "Solid state disk storage will halve the number of servers you need in your company. Or put another way - it will impact Intel's processor sales more than anything done by AMD."

If the person I'm talking to - works for themselves - and relies heavily on their laptop - I give them the good news that the next time they buy a new portable PC - it will run nearly as fast as a desktop (instead of 5 times slower) - and it will have the same charging regime as their cellphone - and as a bonus - it won't feel as uncomfortably hot when they use it on their lap.

The easiest reply the other day - was when I was explaining to my cousin (who's a lawyer) how what's going on in the storage market will impact her 14 year old son - who was having supper with us. I had already embarrassed him at the start of supper by speculating that the 3 most important things in his life were:- PCs, sport and girls. He nodded.

"He won't need such a big house..." I explained. " I need a big house - because I've got about 5,000 books and countless CDs, DVDs and older stuff like tapes and vinyl - and it all takes up a load of space. He's already started running all his media entertainment on PC technology - so throughout his adult life most of his books and music and movies and games will fit onto a single disk which he can carry around with him in his pocket. That's probably good for the environment too - less rooms to heat - less wasted materials - and" an ungreen thought slipped in here "maybe people will actually have space in their garage(s) to park their cars."

And that's not even the whole story...

Megabyte's 5 Year Prediction for the NAS Market

As the market for networked consumer storage in 2011 will be bigger than that for NAS in the enterprise consumer storage companies and products (with much lower price points and cost of sales) will take over what is now regarded as the low and medium levels of the market which are (in 2006) occupied by Network Appliance, HP and EMC.

The consumerization of network storage may be a more aggressive and dramatic process than the consumerization of the PC was for the computer industry in the 1980s and 90s.

If international markets remain open then most, if not all, the world's leading NAS manufacturers by 2011 will be based in China, Taiwan or Korea. The lowest cost place to manufacture NAS will be in proximity to, or in the same factory as, the lowest cost place to manufacture the drives. The ground breaking investments for those super storage plants of the future have already begun.

Standardization will mean there will be much less opportunity for US NAS manufacturers to supply services or higher pricing based on brand strength. Although new markets will be created for very high performance storage systems to deliver the backbone functionality that will be required by the demands of the online digital tv market - it is possible that those needs will be met by server farms of single board computers with onboard embedded solid state disks, and that for most organizations the notion of the "big storage box" may be as irrelevant as the concept of the mainframe is today - for large internet companies like Google.

NAS market shifts may lead to a scramble to acquire high end storage switch and router storage technology - which will become the central cores in enterprise storage environments.

One safe bolthole for the NAS industry will be long term archive storage. Because it's unlikely that the media used for online enterprise storage (which will overlap with consumer products) will comply with the needs of data regulators.

See also:- market research page

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