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by Zsolt Kerekes,
editor - StorageSearch.com
This
article lists key technical, product and market milestones from 1976 to
2011.
After decades in "virtual stealth mode", and
many false starts and setbacks,
the SSD market is now coming out as an
exciting technology which will change
the way in which all computer
systems are designed. |
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Coming of Age for SSDs
Although
manufacturers in the industrial controls market, like Square D and
Allen-Bradley were using rewritable user removable non volatile solid state
storage modules as early as the 1970s, it wasn't till much later that the
solid state
disk market evolved into a form which we would recognise today. For most
of its early life, this technology remained an open secret - mainly used in
embedded systems in military applications, or in high performance computer
research labs.
There were many false starts with Non Volatile
semiconductor technologies which didn't survive.
In the late 1970s -
silicon nitride EAROMs (electrically alterable ROMs) were marketed by
General Instruments. They had electrically controlled block erase (like later
flash memory). The block erase took 100 milli-seconds using a 42V pulse. Read
access time was 2 microseconds which was only 4x slower than other types of MOS
memory in those days. Unfortunately field use showed that the extrapolated
data life of 10 years wouldn't be achieved in practise. As a result many
industrial companies like the company I worked for in 1980 stopped using EAROM
and switched to battery backed CMOS RAM instead.
1976 -
Dataram sold an SSD
called BULK CORE which attached to minicomputers from
Modular Computer Systems and
emulated hard disks made by DEC and Data General. Each chassis held
8x 256k x 18
RAM modules and had a capacity of 2 megabytes.
In
1978 - a gigabyte of RAM SSD would have cost $1 million.
Texas Memory Systems
introduced a 16 kilobyte RAM-based solid state disk system designed to
accelerate field seismic data acquisition for oil companies.
1980
- Dataram marketed
an updated version of their
BULK CORE SSD
for use with
DEC PDP-11 and
Data General minis.
In the early 1980s - Intel's 1M bit bubble memory created
a lot excitement as a new non volatile solid state memory technology. Intel
shipped design kits and boards to developers using this technology - which was
positioned as a solid state floppy disk. But it failed to be scalable or cost
effective. Intel spun off the magnetic division in 1987 to
Memtech (who later made
flash SSDs) but bubble memory dropped into oblivion.
1985 -
Curtis introduced the
ROMDISK, the first SSD for the original
IBM PC.
In
1987
EMC
introduced SSD storage for the mini-computer market, which was the
hottest part of the server market at that time. EMC's SSDs were 20x
faster than the then available hard disks. But market forces and losses led to
EMC exiting the "memory enhancement" business soon after.
1988
-
SanDisk founded.
1989 -
Adtron developed its
first memory card drive for the proprietary memory cards manufactured by Epson
and Mitsubishi. These 1st generation memory card drives found applications with
companies such as GRiD, HP, and Trimble Navigation.
In
1990 -
NEC marketed 5.25"
SCSI SSDs using internal battery backed
RAM.
In 1991
Digital
Equipment Corp marketed the
EZ5x
family of Solid State Disk accelerators. However, at that time
SPARC servers
from Sun already ran 2x to 3x faster than DEC's
Vax
servers (without needing SSDs). And the SPARC servers were 1/2 the price.
In
1993 -
Solid Data Systems was
founded. The company soon after patented technology for Direct AddressingTM -
which maximized SSD performance by translating SCSI addresses directly into
DRAM eliminating intermediate delays.
In 1994 -
StorageTek
documents
mention a RAM SSD product called Arctic Fox which had been developed by a
company called Amperif Corp,
acquired
in 1993.
In 1995 - our
SPARC Directory listed 2
SSD products aimed at the Sun server market.
- T8000 - was an 80MB, 10MBps SSD on a single slot
SBus card,
made by Colorado based CERAM. Units in multiple slots could be chained to appear
as a single SSD upto 960M. Performance was 2,000 IOPs.
- SAM-2000 was a rackmount SSD upto 8GB, with 500MBps internal bandwidth-
made by Texas Memory
Systems. The transfer rate through the SBus adapter was 22MBps. Other bus
interfaces included VMEbus
and
HIPPI.
In
1995 - EDN magazine called
M-Systems' DiskOnChip®
- "1994's most innovative product for embedded systems."
In
1996 - ATTO
Technology maketed the
SiliconDisk
II. It was a 5.25" form factor SCSI-3 interface RAM SSD with 64MB
to 1.6GB capacity. Throughput was 80MB/s, and performance was 22,000 IOPS.
1997 - in the SSD market
A
white paper by Peripheral Concepts listed the main SSD vendors as:-
Quantum,
Imperial Technology,
SEEK Systems, and
Solid Data Systems.
Bridgeworks
designed a RAM SSD
with hard drive backup. Sales Director - David Trossell told me - "It was
a little ahead of its time and the company dropped it after poor sales."
Altec
ComputerSysteme marketed a
range
of SSD modules which converted flash memory cards into
parallel SCSI flash SSDs.
In
1998 - STORAGEsearch.com published a daily updated
online directory of solid state
disk vendors - in which Megabyte
was shown chipping away at a rock - which remains the current site metaphor
used for general SSDs.
In 1999 -
BiTMICRO launched an
18GB 3.5"
flash SSD.
In
November 1999 - the number of market active
SSD manufacturers listed on
STORAGEsearch.com had reached 11.
In
January 2000 - after 8 years featuring editorial about SSDs in our
various publications,
Curtis became our first
SSD advertiser.
In
September 2000
- VMIC embedded
M-Systems'
Diskonchip SSD into
Linux single board computers.
In
November 2000 -
Solid Data Systems
published an article - Solid
State File-Caching for Performance and Scalability
- which discussed the declining performance (versus capacity) in new
generations of hard drives - and showed how SSDs could boost the performance of
legacy servers and RAID systems by x4.
In June 2001 -
Adtron shipped the
world's highest capacity 3.5"
flash SSD. The
S35PC had 14 gigabytes capacity and cost $42,000.
In July 2001 -
Cenatek entered the SSD
market with the launch of its Rocket Drive - a PCI bus RAM SSD which was
designed as a performance accelerator "delivering performance of up to one
million transactions per second." The product's designer Jason
Caulkins - went on later to become the CTO of Dataram's SSD business.
In
Q1 2001 - SSDs were the 18th most popular subject with our readers.
In
October 2001 - the number of market active
SSD manufacturers listed on
STORAGEsearch.com had reached 21.
Texas Memory
Systems began running ads on StorageSearch.com to promote its RamSan-210
- which was a 2U RAM SSD - with 32GB capacity, 4x FC ports, 100,000 IOPS and
20 microseconds access times.
2002 - 1st NAS flash SSD
In
Q1 2002 - SSDs was the 4th most popular subject with our readers.
In
August 2002
- M-Systems and
Toshiba announced a
collaboration to market a 16MB version of M-Systems'
DiskOnChip MLC flash SSD
(which later grew to 2GB capacity in 2004.) |
| In April 2002 the
banner ad (below) ran here on StorageSearch.com. 2002 was our 3rd year
running SSD ads.. |
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| In October 2002 -
BiTMICRO set a new
density record with a 77GB dual ported fibre-channel 3.5" flash SSD. |
In
November 2002 -
Bill
Gates, talking about Tablet PC's said:- "There are also a lot of
peripherals that need to improve here. ...Eventually even the so-called solid
state disks will come along and not only will we have the mechanical disks going
down to 1.8 inch but some kind of solid state disk in the next three to four
years will be part of different Tablet PCs."
The product shown
on the right - from Imperial
Technology (which is no longer in business) - is an example of a 3.5"
parallel SCSI RAM SSD
featured here on StorageSearch.com in June 2002.
In Q4 2002 -
we ran our first ad for a NAS SSD. It was the
NAS-168F from
IEI. |
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2003 - terabyte SSDs become commercially availableIn
February 2003
- Competitors Texas
Memory Systems and Imperial
Technology announced the world's first terabyte class SSD systems.
The
Tera-RamSan, from
TMS, provided 2 million IOPS, a 1024 gigabyte capacity, and 128 2-Gbit Fibre
Channel links. It required 2 racks and 5000 watts.
The MegaRam-10000, from Imperial, cost $2 million for a 1TB
subsystem with 48 fibre channel ports.
In
Q1 2003 - SSDs were 2nd most popular subject with our readers..
In
May 2003
-
Imperial Technology
launched the WhatsHot SSD analysis tool.
In
Q2 2003 - SSDs were #1 most popular subject with our readers.. That's
why we researched and compiled the world's first annual
Solid
State Disks Buyers Guide in July 2003 which collected together in one
convenient document pricing information from across the whole SSD industry.
It covered the range of budgets from under $50 up to $2 million and everything
in between.
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In
2004 StorageSearch.com conducted the world's 1st survey of SSD Buyer buyer
preferences. We also published the 1st SSD Buyers Guide which included prices,
and the 1st market model estimating the $10 billion / year potential of the SSD
market.
In March
2004 - StorageSearch.com reported that SSDs had become the #1 most
popular topic with our readers in Q1 2004. At that time there was a 2 to 1
difference in capacity between the highest density 3.5" SSD and HDD drives.
In
September 2004
- BiTMICRO announced
it was developing iSCSI
SSDs. But due to the hyped iSCSI market in 2004 being 10x smaller than
analyst predictions - this product was quietly shelved.
In Q3 2004
- a solid state disk manufacturer,
Texas Memory Systems,
became the #1 company profile viewed by our readers (out of more than 1,000
storage company profiles in September 2004). We also disclosed that the
Solid state disks directory
(still at #1) got 42% more pageviews than the year ago period.
In
October 2004 - STORAGEsearch opened the
SSD Survey a 3 month
major market research study to learn more about SSD buyer preferences,
applications and attitudes. Results from the survey were published in articles
in 2005 and detailed findings helped SSD vendors understand the needs of
buyers better, and helped them develop marketing plans which worked around the
prevailing disinhibitors to product take-up and leverage the enablers cited by
buyers in the survey.
Also in October 2004 -
BiTMICRO Networks
shipped the world's first Ultra320 SCSI flash solid state disk. |
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In
November 2004 - STORAGEsearch published the 2nd annual
Solid
State Disks Buyers Guide. This listed every type of SSD available in the
market by interface type and form factor. It also included a summary of major
developments in the SSD market in the preceding year.
In December
2004 - It was revealed that Solid State Disks were the Product Category of
the Year 2004 on STORAGEsearch.com based on reader pageviews. The Solid State
Disk page was the #1 category (out of more than 70 vertical storage subjects)
viewed by readers for 44 of the first 50 weeks in 2004. In previous years - the
product category of the year in 2002 and 2003 (2 years running) was SATA. Three
of the world's
fastest
growing storage companies in 2004:- (M-Systems, SimpleTech and Texas Memory
Systems) were solid state disks manufacturers. | |
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2005 - Samsung declares SSDs a strategic market
In January 2005 - STORAGEsearch disclosed results of the
SSD Survey to
strategic oem customers. The results included buyer preferences for form factor
and interface, budgetary data and factors which would make it easier for SSD
vendors to do more business in future. Selected extracts from the survey results
also appeared in articles and editorial.
In March 2005 -
SiliconSystems
announced that Bell
Microproducts would distribute its SSD products in North America. This would
greatly simplify the access to this technology for thousands of systems
integrators and oems.
In March 2005 - 5 out of the top 10
company profiles viewed by STORAGEsearch.com readers in March were SSD Makers
(out of more than 1,000 storage company profiles). Site readership grew 6%
compared to the year ago period and pageviews grew by 25%.
In April 2005 -
Texas Memory Systems
offered the world's first performance related guarantees for SSD products. That
they would outperform any competing storage system, or meet the customer's
agreed application speedup expectation - or the customer would get their monry
back. This approach was founded on market research data from
STORAGEsearch.com's Q405
SSD User Survey - which said that users would be more likely to try SSD
systems if vendors offered such guarantees.
Solid Access
Technologies made the first SSD with a
Serial Attached SCSI
interface.
SiliconSystems
published (what turned out to be) a classic white paper -
Increasing Flash
SSD Reliability.
In May 2005 -
Samsung Electronics
announced it was entering the SSD market with
1.8" and
2.5" drives. This
is the first time in this phase of the SSD market's development that a
multibillion dollar company (Samsung's 2004 revenue was $55.2 billion ) has
entered the market.
Also in May 2005 - this was the first time
that the term "solid state disk" generated enough volume to show up on
the top referring searches to this site.
In
June 2005 -
M-Systems announced
availability of the industry's highest capacity 2.5" SATA SSD with 128
gigabytes of storage. SATA had been identified in STORAGEsearch.com's Q404
market research survey as the #1 most popular interface for future applications.
But at this stage in the market's development (Q205) only 10% of SSD vendors
(3) actually offered products with this interface.
In July
2005 - Texas Memory
Systems launched the industry's first SSDs with a 4Gb/s Fibre Channel
interface. The 3U rackmount system offered upto 128-gigabytes capacity and
500,000 random I/Os per second performance.
In August 2005 -
SimpleTech acquired
Memtech. The
acquisition of one SSD company by another has (so far) been a rare occurrence
but could become more common in future.
In September 2005 -
SimpleTech launched the
world's first dual interface SSD. At launch time the Zeus Dual Interface SSD,
with both a USB and
SATA interface,
offered capacities up to 192GB in a 3.5-inch form factor, and sustained
read/write rates of 60 MBytes per second.
In November 2005 -
STORAGEsearch published a new updated market penetration model for the SSD
market called -
Why are Most
Analysts Wrong About Solid State Disks?
Also in November 2005
- Texas Memory Systems
demonstrated the first solid
state disk with a native
InfiniBand interface
at the Supercomputing conference.
2006 - SSD awareness flares into notebook user market
In January 2006 -
NextCom became
the first notebook maker to qualify flash SSDs* for use in Windows XP, Linux and
Solaris notebooks.
In March 2006 -
Samsung Electronics
started shipping 1.8" 32GB flash SSD drives. Quoting projections from
Web-Feet Research,
Samsung said it expected that the SSD market would double to $1.3 billion in
2007 and reach $4.5 billion by 2010.
Also in March 2006 - the
number of market active SSD
manufacturers listed on STORAGEsearch.com
had reached 36.
In
April 2006 -
Solid Access
Technologies became the first SSD manufacturer to display end user pricing
online for the full range of its SSD products. Previously the volatile nature
of memory pricing and fear of price led competition had meant that most
SSD oems declined to publish any pricing data. The SSD pricing exclusion zone
included their own websites, press releases related to product launches, and
even our own SSD
Buyers Guide.
In May 2006 -
Samsung launched the
world's first high volume Windows XP notebook using SSDs.
In June
2006 - SiliconSystems
launched its SiliconDrive Secure family which included the widest range of
available storage
security features in a solid state disk.
In July 2006 -
market research
company In-Stat
predicted that 50% of mobile computers would use SSDs (instead of
hard disks) by 2013.
Also
in July 2006 - Xiotech
announced support for solid
state disks as accelerators in its Magnitude 3D 3000 virtual storage systems
- making it the first Fibre
channel SAN switch maker to support SSD technology.
In
August 2006 - the number of market active
SSD manufacturers listed on
STORAGEsearch.com had reached 41.
DV Nation became the
first US reseller to market SSDs online aimed at consumers and SMBs.
In
September 2006 - Samsung
Electronics announced first working prototypes of PRAM -
Phase-change Random Access Memory. This is a new non-volatile
RAM technology. Samsung
said PRAM is expected to replace high density NOR
flash within the next
decade
Also in September 2006 - the growth of market interest
in SSDs was revealed by STORAGEsearch.com's
web statistics. Pageviews on our main
SSD page increased 50%
in September compared to the year before period, even though readership had
only grown by 10%. The pageview growth happened despite the fact that the SSD
page had slipped down to #3 (out of hundreds of storage categories.) This
indicates a concentrated shift by readers towards the hottest subjects that
matter most to their future plans. At the same time a greater proportion of the
most popular storage
articles were about SSDs.
Also in September 2006 -
Broadbus was acquired
by Motorola.
In October
2006 -
SimpleTech acquired UK
SSD maker Gnutek.
In
November 2006 - Microsoft
announced business availability of its
new
Vista operating system - the first PC market OS which included SSD-aware
support and native SSD cache management.
Also in November 2006
- SimpleTech
demonstrated the first single chip SSD with
USB or IDE interface. The
chip is available with upto 4GB capacity.
Also in November 2006
- SanDisk acquired
M-Systems which had
been the fastest
growing storage company in 2004.
In December 2006 -
Microsoft published
an article:-
Windows
PC Accelerators - which described in detail how the recently launched
Windows Vista OS supports solid state disks.
Also in December
2006 - Advanced
Media entered the SSD market taking the total number of SSD manufacturers
listed on STORAGEsearch.com to 44 - which is 4 times as many as in 1999.
I called 2007 - the "Year of SSD Revolutions".
This was the year in which
2.5" and 3.5"
flash SSDs from Mtron
and Memoright broke
away from the me-too performance pack - and showed that single flash SSD
drives in traditional HDD form factors could economically challenge the R/W
throughput and random IOPs of the fastest enterprise
hard drives.
Meanwhile
rackmount flash
SSDs from EasyCo (array
of COTS SSDs) and Texas
Memory Systems (proprietary flash array) showed that flash SSDs could
replace some market niches previously held by
RAM SSDs - at much
lower cost and without worrying about wear-out.
Fears and
myths about
endurance had in earlier years precluded flash as a serious contender in
high R/W applications. And although those problems would reoccur - with good
reasons - in later phases of the market - SLC was a safe technology choice in
server apps - provided the controller
architecture was designed correctly.
Year of the SSD Centurians. This is the year which the
number of SSD oems passed
100 companies, and in the server market fast flash SSDs broke the
asymmetric R/W IOPS
barrier!
I explained why I thought 2009 would go down in history as
the Year of SSD
Market Confusion. This is the year in which search volume for
PCIe SSDs
surpassed that for any other SSD form factor - knocking
2.5" SSDs off the
#1 slot.
It was also the year that flash SSDs reached the same storage
density as hard drives in the same form factor.
As 2010 was about to dawn I explained why I thought this would be seen as
the start of the SSD
market bubble. This was the first year that SSD market revenue reached
billions of dollars.
2010 1st
quarter - among other things...
- Fusion-io (the
#1 company in the quarterly
top 10 SSD companies
list) announced 300% annual revenue growth - thereby confirming
that its New Dynasty
approach to the market was getting a positive reaction to those with budgets and
the company was not simply a favorite with editors and
analysts.
- ioSafe launched the
ioSafe Solo SSD - an ultra rugged USB
/ eSATA external flash SSD with upto 256GB capacity ($1,250) designed to
provide data protection against disasters such as fire, flood, and building
collapse. At this stage of the SSD market development less than 3 companies had
talked seriously about the subject of
using SSDs as backup. It
would be several years later before that market emerged with a strong identity
and became a billion dollar market in its own right.
2010 2nd
quarter - among other things...
- Anobit
announced it is sampling
SSDs based on its patented Memory Signal Processing technology which provide
20x improvement in operational life for MLC SSDs in high IOPS server
environments. This guarantees drive
write endurance
of 10 full disk writes per day, for 5 years.
2010 3rd quarter
- among other things...
- Foremay announced
it is shipping 2TB 3.5"
and 1TB 2.5"
SATA flash SSDs in its EC188 M-series model V product range. R/W speeds are up
to 200MB/s. ECC is 24-bit. The SSDs are bootable and support all major
operating systems.
- NVELO launched
Dataplex - a software product
aimed at PC oems - which provides
SSD ASAP
functionality inside a
notebook.
Dataplex said it will begin shipping from select Tier 1 PC OEMs in 2011.
- SanDisk
announced
that NDS (a tv set top box designer with
with over 30 million DVR units deployed) has successfully has designed SanDisk
SSDs into a new range of lower cost set-top DVRs. SanDisk asserted that SSDs
are cheaper than HDDs in entry level DVRs
2010 4th quarter
- among other things...
- Samsung said it
is shipping 200GB 3.5"
SATA SLC SSDs to EMC.
Sequential R/W speeds are 260MB/s and 245MB/s respectively. R/W
IOPS are
47,000 and 29,000. The new Samsung SSDs have an 'end-to-end
data integrity'
function and encryption.
Business activity in the SSD market
was energized by the realization that SSD companies were worth a lot of money.
Initially indicated by the valuation of
Fusion-io's IPO in
the 1st half of the year - a spate of acquisitions of SSD controller companies
later in the year revealed that the storage industry had great expectations
for the future size of the SSD market.
among other things... here were
the main highlights
- January 2011 -
SandForce disclosed
that their SSD controllers
perform real-time compression and dedupe inside the chip as part of their
housekeeping routines.
- March 2011 - OCZ
acquired
Indilinx for for
approximately $32 million.
WD announced it
will acquire Hitachi GST
for approximately $4.3 billion.
Fusion-io
announced
it had filed with the SEC for a proposed IPO. When this went ahead - in the
following quarter - the company's market cap was nearly $2.5 billion. That
created a lot of excitement and confidence in other enterprise SSD companies
who were thinking about what their own private companies might be worth.
- June 2011 - FlashSoft
launched its first product - software which enables enterprise flash to be
used as a cost-effective, server-tier computing resource (ASAP functionality in
software) which is available for free evaluation through a 30-day "Try
Before You Buy" program.
- July 2011 - OCZ
is sampling a new dual core ARM based
SSD controller for
6Gbps SATA SSDs which
can deliver upto 500MB/s sequential throughput and 200 mega transfers per
second. The
Indilinx Everest
platform supports up to 1x nm NAND Flash with 1, 2, or 3 bits per cell,
has 70 bits of BCH ECC
per sector, end to end data protection, fast boot options (50% faster than
competing SSDs) and enhanced
power fail
protection. The new platform - supports 1TB flash capacity and has a
400MHz DDR3 DRAM
cache interface with support for up to 512MB.
- August 2011 -
Fusion-io announced
that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire
IO Turbine for
approximately $95 million. SANRAD
introduced the industry's 1st front loadable
PCIe flash SSD
accelerators as options in its V-Switch storage appliances .
- September 2011 -
Anobit
announced it is
sampling the fastest (yet) 2.5"
SATA SSDs based on its
own controller design. The new
Genesis
SSDs (upto 400GB) delivers up to 70,000/40,000
IOPS (4K
block size) and 510 MB/s sequential read/write with non-compressible data
using 2xnm MLC NAND. Anobit says its patented Memory Signal Processing
technology elevates
MLC endurance
from 3,000 write cycles to over 50,000.
- December 2011 - Apple acquired
Anobit for a
sum thought to be in the range $400 to $500 million.
what happened next?
SSD news - gives you a
summary of the past month.
The SSD Buyers Guide
- lists key milestones in the past 6 months upto and including November 2011. |
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| STORAGEsearch is published by
ACSL | |
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| Megabyte's ancestor, Sir
Squeaks-a-Bit, could remember the days when computers were made out of
clickety metal reeds and magnets. |
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| "...For more than a decade
StorageSearch.com with its collaborators and readers have been - making
SSD history – not just writing about it...."
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| the SSD story - market
survival of the fittest? |
The
emerging size of
the flash SSD market as you see it today was by no means inevitable. It owes a
lot to 3 competing storage media competitors which failed to evolve fast enough
in the Darwinian jungle of the storage market in the
past decade.
One of these 3 contenders is definitely on the road to extinction -
but could one of the other 2 still emerge to threaten flash SSDs?
The
article -
SSD's past phantom
demons explores the latent market threats which hovered around the flash SSD
market in the past decade. They seemed real and solid enough at the time. |
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Getting a realistic
perspective of flash SSD's past demons (which seemed very threatening at the
time) may help you better judge the so-called "new" generation of nv
memory contenders - which are also discussed in the article. ...read the article | | | |
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| TMS's
founder writes about 20 years of DoD SSDs |
Editor:- September 20, 2010 -
Holly Frost founder of Texas Memory Systems
has written a paper (pdf)
which describes how variants of the company's newer SSDs like the
RamSan-630 have been used
recently by the US DoD and Intelligence Community.
In
another article he
describes some features of their 1st DoD SSD in 1988. The company launched its
1st commercial enterprise SSDs in 2001 - but has continued evolving its
defense based array processing capabilities.
Later:- in December
2011 - I talked to Holly Frost - who says the SSD market is the most
exciting place to be working - about
a wide range of
subjects related to SSD design and the SSD market. | | |
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| Where does all the money
go? - inside SSD pricing |
| SSDs are among the most
expensive (and complex) computer hardware products you will ever buy and
understanding the factors which determine SSD costs is often a confusing
and irritating process... ...which is not made any easier when market prices
for apparently identical capacity SSDs can vary more than 100x to 1!
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Why is that? There are
good reasons for these cost differences. But more expensive isn't always better
for you. To find out what goes into the price - and whether you need it - ...read the article | | | |
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| The
History Of Solid State Memory Storage Devices (pdf) |
This is a guide written by
ViON and
accurately sums up one of the problems which faced SSD accelerator makers from
the late 1980s to mid 1990s period until
FC SANs got established.
Here's an extract...
"Over time many other vendors have
entered, and left the business of providing solid state storage systems. Solid
state developed a reputation of being really great, if you could afford it.
This was due to an inherent flaw in the basic design theory. In short, the flaw
arises from the fact that while the storage mechanism of a solid state device is
fast, the interfaces required to connect to a host system were not fast enough
to take advantage of the performance potential.
"During this timeframe (and continuing to the present time) most
solid state systems employ slow SCSI connections. During the 1980s, 1990s and
into the 2000s, SCSI
was a slow interface and could sustain data transfer rates of only 40 to 80 MB
per second. At these speeds, host computers could not really realize the
benefits necessary to capitalize on the very high initial investment solid
state storage is expensive!" | | |
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| when did it
become clear that SSDs would be a huge market? |
Editor:- SSDs have been listed
in the buyers guides I've published since 1992. And in 1998 - I published the
world's 1st continuously updated directory of SSD oems (the url of which is now
our main SSD news page).
By
talking to people in the SSD market and in processor chip companies (as part
of my SPARC market
acceleration work) in the late 1990s and early 2000s I guessed that SSDs had
the potential to become an economic mainstream solution (instead of an
expensive niche) to counter the flattening of the peak performance growth
curve in enterprise CPUs.
But how big would that SSD market be?
When I started talking to enterprise SSD companies about my market
models in
2003 (at that time "enterprise
SSD" was synonymous with "RAM SSD") they were initially
skeptical. Each SSD company was only seeing a small part of the market. But my
SSD pages were acting as a focus point for all vendors and most users in the
industry. It was easy for me to get an overview picture which no one else was in
a position to see.
I talked to many SSD company founders at that time -
explaining my ideas, learning more about what their technologies could do. And
they told me about customer success stories which their customers didn't want
to publicize - because it would give their customers' competitors too many
insights into how they had solved strategic business problems using SSDs.
As
a consensus view started to emerge from these many 1 on 1s - some SSD
companies (including some in their early years of stealth mode) adapted
their business plans around the concept of a greatly expanded SSD market
future.
A few years later - in
2005 - I
published a new version of my SSD market penetration model which looked at
all the possible market segments for SSDs instead of just the enterprise.
That model was precipitated by the steep dive in flash memory pricing which
meant that flash SSDs would soon be 100x cheaper than just a few years
before.
Marketers in flash SSD companies liked the new model even
better. And were happy to tell me privately how useful it was. They even
started to quote from it - although by the time the text had made it into their
sales collaterals and web sites the original attribution was mostly lost.
Where are we now?
At the start of 2010 - I called it -
Year of SSD market
bubble.
And I predicted 2011 - would be
Year of
Reality Checks for SSD Makers | | |
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| flash storage in notebooks
predated SSDs |
Timeline Correction
I originally
stated that - in January 2006 -
NextCom became
the first notebook maker to qualify flash SSDs*.
I later added the
note "for use in Windows XP, Linux and Solaris notebooks."
Thanks
to Robin Harris, editor StorageMojo.com
for this email note (April 19, 2006).
"The original
HP
Omnibook 300 offered a PCMCIA flash disk as a several hundred dollar
option ($400?) back in (I think) 1993.
"I know because I bought it and used one for years. The option
had 10MB of capacity and HP packaged in a compression utility that
automatically compressed everything on the flash card, so the effective
capacity was 20MB.
"The real benefit wasn't weight, as the 300 weighed in at 2.9lbs
with or without a hard disk. The win was battery life - which went to 10
hours with the SSD from about 3-4 hours with the HDD.
"With an instant-on feature that really worked, and a decent PDA
and terminal emulation, built in Word & Excel (to which I added
Powerpoint) I had a very solid, unfussy machine that I only had to charge
every few days. Lived with it daily for 5 years until I had to give it up
because it would no longer do what I needed."
Editor:- strictly
speaking the Omnibook drive wasn't an SSD, because it didn't include
wear-leveling. But
it was an early example of
flash replacing hard
disk storage in a notebook style product. | | |
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| sugaring MLC for the
enterprise |
When flash SSDs started to be used as
enterprise server accelerators in 2004 - competing
RAM SSD makers said
flash wasn't reliable
enough.
RAM SSDs had been used for server speedups
since 1976
- and in 2004 they owned the enterprise market. (Before 2004 - flash SSDs
weren't fast enough and had mostly been used as rugged storage in the
military and
industrial
markets - and in space
constrained civilian products such as smartphones.)
By 2007 it was
clear that the endurance
of SLC flash was more than good enough to survive in high
IOPS server
caches. And in the ensuing years the debate about enterprise flash SSDs shifted
to MLC - because when systems integrators put early cheap consumer grade SSDs
into arrays - guess what happened? They burned out within a few months - exactly
as predicted.
Since 2009 new
controller
technologies and the combined market experience of enterprise MLC pioneers
like Fusion-io and
SandForce have
demonstrated that with the right management - MLC can survive in most (but
still not all) fast SSDs.
Now as we head into 1X nanometer flash
generations new technical challenges are arising and MLC SSD makers disagree
about which is the best way to implement enterprise MLC SSDs.
Which
type of so called "enterprise MLC" is best? Can you believe the
contradictory marketing claims? Can you even understand the arguments? (Probably
not.)
And that's why marketing is going to play a bigger part in the
next round of enterprise SSD wars as SSD companies wave their wands and reveal
more about the magic inside their SSD engines to audiences who don't really
understand half of what they're being told. |
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| Genesis of
the Serial Attached SCSI
SSD Market |
The
SAS SSD market was the
slowest part of the SSD market to take off - in the post "SSD awareness"
era.
And for many years there were only 1 or 2 vendors in the market.
One flash
SSD oem (Adtron) had
even said publicly in
2007 they
couldn't
see the need for SAS SSDs at all - because the leap in performance going from
hard drives to
SATA flash SSDs was
already so great - that the marginal difference of SAS wouldn't be worthwhile.
Here's the timeline
November 2001 - Serial
Attached SCSI was proposed as a new interface.
StorageSearch.com became the 1st
publisher to set up a dedicated directory for
SAS storage.
January
2005 - the SSD
buyers survey showed SAS SSDs as the 8th most desirable SSD interface to
meet buyers' future needs. The #1 on this list (with 5x as many responders
saying they would use it) was
SATA SSDs - although
at the time of the survey - neither type of product actually existed.
April
2005 -
Solid Access
Technologies made the first SSD with a SAS interface. It was a rackmount
RAM SSD.
August
2007 - STEC
announced it was designing a
3.5" SAS SSD.
December
2008 - Hitachi and
Intel announced they were
jointly designing a new range of high IOPS flash SSDs with
SAS interfaces -
expected to ship in Q1 2010.
January 2009 - As the number of
oems talking about SAS SSDs headed towards double digits - StorageSearch.com
launched a dedicated directory page for
SAS SSDs. The SAS SSD
timeline continues on that page right up to the present day with SAS SSD news.
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