| see also:-
BiTMICRO
- editor mentions on StorageSearch.com |
| .......... |
Who's
who in SSD? - by
Zsolt Kerekes,
editor - February 20, 2012
BiTMICRO is 1 of more than 100
companies listed in these directories:-
military SSDs,
industrial SSDs,
3.5" SSDs,
2.5" SSDs,
FC SSDs,
SATA SSDs,
PATA SSDs,
SCSI SSDs and also in
the
Top 20 SSD companies.
There
have been many times in
SSD history
that a company which everyone is talking about as the technology and market
leader - fails to maintain its momentum - and disappears from view...
Sometimes
for years.
Often forever.
In the past 30 years I can only
think of 3 companies which have achieved significant comebacks after a
protracted multi-year market sabbatical and yet managed to generate the
same level of excitement (or more) as they did the first time around.
A
4th one of those in 2012 could well be BiTMICRO.
talking "enterprise
flash SSD" in 2000
Like all the flash SSD pioneers in the mid
to late 1990s BiTMICRO started out in the rugged embedded industrial /
military market.
(There was no such thing as a "consumer"
market for SSDs in those days - because high capacity fast MIL SSDs cost
upwards of $10K each.)
But amongst all the ruggedness and reliability
talk - which were part of the flash SSD vernacular - BiTMICRO sometimes
threw in a word which was seldom mentioned in the context of flash SSD storage
- "enterprise".
There already were enterprise SSD companies
around at the start of the new millenium - but "enterprise SSDs"
were understood to be "RAM SSD". You didn't
even have to add the word "enterprise". All SSDs were either - RAM
for server acceleration - or flash for rugged apps. The distinctions within
flash came much later.
BiTMICRO was the first flash SSD maker to
seriously raise the topic of using flash SSDs to replace HDDs in enterprise
storage. And this was no - pigs might fly talk - because BiTMICRO had the
technology to do it - even if the costs were still prohibitive.
For
example in 2000 when they launched the 1st true hot-swappable SCSI SSD they
talked about using it in RAID systems.
And in 2004 the company
published a case study showing how a single one of its 3.5" flash SSDs was
able to accelerate a 25,000 user email system - giving performance 4x faster
than RAMdisk and 15x faster than HDD RAID.
And at the tail end of
2007 the
company unveiled a high speed
terabyte class 3.5" FC
flash SSD.
That was exciting stuff - and for a brief time it
looked like BiTMICRO might step out of its industrial / military safety
blanket to emerge as one of the future leaders in the enterprise flash SSD
market too.
But that didn't happen.
And if there was even
a tentative step in that direction - it took too long - and nobody noticed in
the glare coming from a rush of new start up traffic racing along the newly
enlarged SSD market highway.
just another SSD company
By
the end of
2008 there
were over 100 companies in the SSD market - and many SSD pioneers were sidelined
by the competitive onslaught.
Customers didn't have to wait for
pioneers like BiTMICRO to scale their technologies and design new products. In
the next few years - new companies were entering the SSD market at a rate
greater than one a week.
Our readers didn't hear so much from
BiTMICRO and it appeared to go back into stealth mode.
If you'd
asked me a year ago what I thought about BiTMICRO - I would have said - this is
a company which was once a mover and shaker in the early days of the flash SSD
market - but its most notable achievements have been in the past.
BiTMICRO's
website had become so dormant it gave the distinct impression of being
another "gone-away" storage company.
re-emerging from
stealth mode
When BiTMICRO contacted me again in the summer of
2011 after a long period of silence I said I was surprised to hear they were
still in business.
BiTMICRO's Marketing Manager,
Cecilia Martorillas
told me that the company had been working in its heartland of high
performance rugged SSDs and that unlike many others in their market who had
chosen the SandForce inside route as the way to market continuity - all the
SSDs BiTMICRO offered still used their own design of controllers.
At
that time all BiTMICRO's SSDs used SLC flash but Cecilia said they would
soon be announcing details of new MLC SSDs and controllers.
BiTMICRO
unveiled details of its new SSD controller architecture in November 2011 -
and in January 2012 announced that it had taped out the new chips.
So
we can expect to see new SSDs based on this new controller - called the
TALINO-DE - sometime in the next few quarters.
has the long wait
for a new BiTMICRO enterprise SSD been worthwhile?
The multi-core
TALINO-DE is
big SSD
architecture (manages hundreds of flash chips) and includes full data path
protection, end-to-end
data integrity,
embedded AES engines for data
security, embedded XOR engines for delivering faster transaction processing
in RAID configurations,
power
management, and other resource optimization.
It is expected to
deliver upto 400,000
IOPS performance,
support upto 5TB capacity and will be available in SSDs with
SAS,
SATA,
Fibre Channel, and
PCIe interfaces .
When it ships - this enterprise SSD controller will be the most
significant product family from BiTMICRO in more than decade.
In
performance terms it fits
Depending
how the product will be marketed - and it's not publicly known at the present
time - whether SSDs using the new controller will only be available from
BiTMICRO - the new SSDs could create a market buzz like we haven't seen since
SandForce emerged from stealth mode in
2009.
For
more info about BiTMICRO take a look at the links above and
BiTMICRO
- editor mentions on StorageSearch.com.
I currently talk to more
than 300 makers of SSDs and another 100 or so companies which are
closely enmeshed around the SSD ecosphere - which are all profiled here on
the mouse site.
I learn about new SSD companies every day, including
many in stealth mode. If you're interested in the growing
big picture of
the SSD market canvass - StorageSearch will help you along the way. Many
SSD company CEOs read our site too - and say they value our thought leading SSD
content - even when we say something that's not always comfortable to hear. I
hope you'll find it it useful too. |
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In November
2007 -
BiTMICRO announced
plans to sample a terabyte
class 3.5" flash SSD in Q108. With 1.6TB capacity and a 4Gbps
Fibre Channel interface -
it will deliver sustained throughput more than 230MBps and upwards of 55,000
IOPS. ...Later:- BiTMICRO announced the 1st customer shipments of this much
anticipated product line in November 2008.
In
March 2009 - BiTMICRO's CEO -
Rey Bruce - shared his
SSD Bookmarks
with readers of
StorageSearch.com.
In
May 2010 - BiTMICRO
published a white
paper (pdf) which describes the
risks of SSD
data loss from power disturbances - and outlines the design approach they
have taken to minimize data corruption in their E-Disk Altima SSD product range.
- "Power is a fundamental need but it can also be the biggest threat to the
reliability and operation of any system." ... read the
article (pdf)
in October 2011 -
BiTMICRO collaborated
with Cadence and
Synopsys to set up a
new micro-chip design
training center in
the Philippines - called the Bruce Institute
of Technology - named after the Bruce brothers who founded BiTMICRO.
In
November 2011 - BiTMICRO
announced
that it has designed a new generation of enterprise
SSD controllers which
will deliver upto 400,000 IOPS performance, support upto 5TB capacity and will
be available in SSDs with SAS,
SATA,
Fibre Channel, and
PCIe interfaces in the
first half of 2012.
In January 2012 - BiTMICRO
announced
that its new TALINO-DE
- SSD controller -
has just gone through
tape-out
with Global Unichip.
“The
combination of GUC’s PCIe, SATA, SAS PHY IP products and the broad scope of
their flexible SoC design services, manufacturing capabilities and strong
relationship with TSMC gave us no reason to hold back in our designs. From the
start, we are confident the TALINO-DE controller will create a huge impact in
the storage industry. Backed by GUC’s world-class testing facilities, we
know they are the most viable option for us,” said Rey Bruce, CEO of
BiTMICRO Networks. |
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| BiTMICRO's
new Big SSD Architecture - ASIC platform |
Editor:- November 21, 2011 - BiTMICRO today
announced
that it has designed a new generation of enterprise
SSD controllers which
will deliver upto 400,000
IOPS performance,
support upto 5TB capacity and will be available in SSDs with
SAS,
SATA,
Fibre Channel, and
PCIe interfaces in the
first half of 2012.
BiTMICRO's new ASIC based platform architecture consists of a
multi-core SSD controller integrated with multiple high-speed serial on-chip
buses and embedded processors
"It is with high anticipation that
we see these technologies come to fruition and work for our customers" said
BiTMICRO's CEO, Rey
Bruce.
Editor's comments:- 4 years ago BiTMICRO was at
the top of its game (and
#1 in the top SSD
companies list) with an industry leading terabyte class
3.5" FC SSD
sampling (called the E-Disk
Altima ) but the company's market was in the gunsights of about 50 newly
emerging flash SSD companies in that
Year of SSD
Revolutions which soon after grabbed many of the sub-markets which
previously had been divided up among just a handful of enterprise flash
vendors.
Back to today's news from BiTMICRO...
A 2 stage SSD
controller architecture - with a core intelligent unit - which fans out to
distributed flash slave teams is a proven architectural concept in high
performance enterprise SSDs.
For example it's used in products by
Virident Systems
(whose controller can keep 256 flash die active concurrently on R/W garbage
collection etc) and a 2 stage design is also used by
Texas Memory Systems
(whose host side facing controller can
packet up multiple
FC channels into a single virtual route into the flash array). |
 |
These are examples of what I call
big SSD
architecture - which is more efficient (higher percentage of usable
capacity), faster and more
reliable in large
capacity SSD products than the alternative - which is building arrays of "small
architecture" SSDs. | | | |
| . |
| BiTMICRO
nurtures microchip design training in Philippines |
Editor:- October 25, 2011 - the Bruce Institute of Technology is a new
training institute in the Philippines - focused on microchip design - which has
been set up in a collaborated effort led by BiTMICRO in
partnership with Synopsys,
Cadence and
leading universtities.
The name celebrates the family name of the Bruce
brothers - who founded BiTMICRO in
1995 as
an ASIC design consultancy - before embarking on their pioneering market
developments in flash SSDs.
BiTMICRO's Chairman and CEO, Rey Bruce
said The Philippines traction in the global microelectronics industry is almost
entirely concentrated in assembly, fabrication and manufacturing. BiTMICRO is
practically the only Filipino founded and owned company engaging into actual
microchip design and engineering. We will do our part in uplifting the
industry to higher valued services and service capabilities with the
technology and products that we develop and produce in the country but this will
be not enough. Our goal with BIT is replicate our success at BiTMICRO in
developing microelectronic design skills.
Rudy Bruce, President of BIT, said We hope to eventually build a
critical mass of locally developed engineers that can make the Philippines a
favored destination of the worlds best microelectronic design companies. We
still believe in the Filipinos ingenuity and their ability to be relevant in the
world stage. | | |
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In June 2011 - I asked
Cecilia Martorillas, Marketing
Manager
BiTMICRO some
questions to help me update my understanding of where they are now with
respect to SSD markets and technologies. |
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| .. |
Zsolt:- |
Is your current product line exclusively SLC?
(I know you did some MLC some years ago but I wasnt sure if thats still
current.)
|
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Cecilia:- |
Yes, our product line is exclusively SLC.
MLC-based
products will be available in our next-generation Industrial SSDs. |
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Zsolt:- |
I assume that all your products use your own
controllers / SSD management IP. Is that still correct? |
|
Cecilia:- |
Yes
|
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Zsolt:- |
What's your positioning / competitive angle with
regard to the growing use of MLC in industrial SSDs, and widening use of
standard 3rd party controllers? |
|
Cecilia:- |
SLC has always been the flash chip of choice
because of higher reliability, faster performance, and higher write endurance
compared to MLC for rugged applications. Since most of military/industrial
applications such as data recording, data acquisition, and digital audio/video
recording require high reliability, availability, and write endurance, it is
imperative to use the flash chip that will support these requirements. However,
MLC can be used for low cost and less strict industrial application
requirements.
SSD vendors on the other hand who prefer the use of 3rd
party controllers do not have much of a differentiator compared to another
vendor using the same controller. Military/industrial customers often require
customizations that will fit their applications. Some of them may need higher
capacities for longer recording time or a variety of storage interfaces. There
are customers still requiring SCSI Narrow, Ultra320 SCSI, and Fibre Channel
while most of the 3rd party controllers available in the market usually support
ATA/SATA interfaces only.
BiTMICRO, having been a pioneer in the SSD industry serving
military/industrial customers for over a decade now, leverages on its ASIC
capability in terms of flexibility in rugged applications. Most, if not all, 3rd
party controllers that we have seen have limitations on capacity scalability and
wide support for storage interfaces. These are limitations addressed in
BiTMICROs ASIC architecture. We are the only SSD vendor that can scale up in SLC
capacity utilizing our Logical Unifier of Extensive Transfer Arrays (LUNETA)
ASIC.
As an example, our Fibre Channel SSD, the only FC Industrial SSD in
the market, can scale up to 1TB in a single form factor. Our Enhanced Datamover
Storage Accelerator (EDSA) not only supports ATA and SATA but also supports SCSI
Narrow, Ultra320 SCSI and 4Gb Fibre Channel storage interfaces. |
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Zsolt:- |
Do you have any up to date case studies that
might be worth our readers looking at? |
|
Cecilia:- |
No we don't have at the moment as most of our
customers require non-disclosure of their applications/usage
| | |
| . |
| Fast Purge SSDs |
The need for fast and
secure data erase - in which vital parts of a flash SSD or its data are
destroyed in seconds - has always been a requirement in military projects.
 Although
many industrial SSD vendors offer products with extended "rugged"
operating environment capabilities - and even
notebooks SSDs come
with encryption - it's the availability of fast data purge which
differentiates "truly secure" SSDs which can be deployed in
sensitive applications.
| | |
| . |
| SSD sudden power
loss vulnerability guide |
Why should you care
what happens in an SSD when the power goes down?
This important design
feature - which barely rates a mention in most SSD datasheets and press releases
- has a strong impact on
SSD data integrity
and operational
reliability.
This article will help you understand why some
SSDs which (work perfectly well in one type of application) might fail in
others... even when the changes in the operational environment appear to be
negligible. |
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