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Dataram

Founded in 1967, Dataram is a recognized worldwide leader in the manufacture of high quality computer memory and a pioneer in auto tiering SSD SAN storage appliances.
.... click for more info about Dataram

The company delivers value to its customers through solutions that optimize data center and application performance, while at the same time delivering significant cost savings without introducing risk. Dataram products and solutions are deployed in 70 of the Fortune 100 companies and governmental agencies including the Department of Defense who use Dataram products for the most demanding mission critical applications.

see also:- Dataram - editor mentions on StorageSearch.com and Dataram's SSD blog
  • editor's comments:- November 2011 - Dataram markets rackmount SSD appliances in a market category which I call SSD ASAPs (SSDs As Soon As Possible aka auto-tiering SSD accelerators).

    In my SSD business model and architecture classifications - Dataram is Legacy and Big Architecture. If you click those preceding links you'll see some interesting competitor groupings.

    Users in the emerging SSD ASAPs market have frustrated many vendor expectations by treading slowly, cautiously and hesitatingly towards these products - instead of rushing to adopt them. Users wanted to see if claims made by vendors (that their products would automatically work to speed up apps) would be proven in practise (preferably somewhere else). In the last few years Dataram, like other ASAP vendors found that instead of getting a rush of customers beating a path to their door - the company had to instead invest considerable resources to acquire customer test and reference sites.

    Dataram publicaly acknowledged that its original XcelaSAN lacked HA features which were needed to make it more appealing to users in the fibre-channel SAN market. The company said it had fixed this feature gap with the announcement of its XcelaSAN Model 100 in March 2011.

    Competitors to Dataram?

    Dataram has few technically equivalent competitors - but one of those in the FC SAN ASAP category is recently emerged GridIron Systems.

    Customers who want to accelerate their FC SAN storage - using tier 1 type products - and who have small enough total capacity to place it all in SSD - might also consider looking at Huawei Symantec , Kaminario and Violin Memory.

    If you're happy about putting cards inside your servers, or replacing the servers, while keeping your existing SAN storage, another option is to look at PCIe SSDs in particular those with auto-tiering software support - such as Fusion-io. The PCIe route won't work if your SAN data is the bottleneck for a bunch of distributed servers - but it might work OK if your installation only has a few colocated servers - which can be mopped up into a single faster SSD accelerated unit.
Dataram recent mentions in SSD market history

In October 2008 - Dataram re-entered the SSD market with the acquisition of strategic assets from Cenatek whose CEO has joined Dataram to lead the company's return to solid state storage, an area they "pioneered 32 years ago.." ...Earlier:- in 1976 - Dataram sold an SSD called BULK CORE which attached to minicomputers from ModComp 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.

This is a very significant milestone for the SSD market because it shows the strategic value that memory makers place on SSDs.

In the past companies like Intel have resold 3rd party SSD cards, STEC divested itself of its vanilla memory business and Samsung would like to own and control MLC patents now in the hands of SanDisk.

Look at it from the viewpoint of a memory maker.

Future server systems will have orders of magnitude more memory in the attached SSDs than installed as main RAM memory. Who owns the brand of the SSD boxes will mean a dramatic difference to attainable revenue. Being locked out of the SSD box - will mean that a memory maker can only access smaller markets - or supply other SSD oems at commodity proces. I expect to report many more such acquisitions during the next few years.

When discussing this story my wife said this is an example of a marketing concept called "forward integration."

In August 2009 - Dataram said it will launch an SSD accelerator at SNW in October. The product is currently being evaluated by key customers.

"As we prepare to launch a data storage acceleration product, we have studied the current state of solid state storage appliances very carefully to understand the strengths and weaknesses of available solutions," said Jason Caulkins, Dataram's Chief Technologist. "The features, benefits and hidden compromises the customer must accept with today's generation of solid state storage appliances are not always obvious. We hope to help our customers understand all their options and provide them with a much better solution."

In September 2009 - Dataram launched the XcelaSAN - a fast 2U rackmount flash SSD with 450,000 random IOPS performance (assuming 50/50 R/W and 4k blocks), and upto 8x 4Gbps FC ports - aimed at the SAN application acceleration market. Pricing starts at $65,000 for a unit with approx 360GB internal flash, of which 128GB is effectively used as a cache.

In November 2009 - Dataram is running a webinar - Navigating the Maze of Solid State Storage Solutions. Viewers will discover - "How to better gauge your storage traffic to identify bottlenecks and areas where solid state storage can provide a day 1 positive ROI."

In July 2010 - Dataram reported that its annual revenue for the year ended April 30 grew 70% to $44 million incurring a net loss of $1.6 million. Dataram's president and CEO - John H. Freeman said the company is increasing resources into evolving its XcelaSAN (ASAP) product line and plans to launch HA versions later in the year.

In August 2010 - StorageSearch.com published SSD Bookmarks - suggested by Jason Caulkins, Chief Technologist Dataram.

In October 2010 - Dataram launched a campaign called - Let Us Prove It to You - to persuade users to evaluate its XcelaSAN (an FC rackmount SSD ASAP) - which the company says can dynamically and transparently improves I/O performance up to 30x in the users own SAN environment with block-level caching. Dataram is so confident in the results and ease of installation that a 32GB iPad will be given to organizations that complete the evaluation.

In April 2011 - Dataram has doubled the RAM cache available in its XcelaSAN (2U rackmount fibre-channel SAN SSD accelerator) to 256GB (the system price is approx $75,000). XcelaSAN delivers up to 30x transparent R/W acceleration to attached disk storage arrays with a high-availability architecture (internal performance is upto 450,000 IOPS). Unlike most solid state storage solutions, XcelaSAN dynamically caches high I/O activity application data when it is needed, to support multiple applications many times larger than the cache itself.

In September 2011 - Dataram announced that Dell OEM Solutions will manufacture and support Dataram's FC SAN compatible auto-tiering / SSD ASAP - the XcelaSAN from November 2011.

In October 2011 - Dataram published a 25 minutes video describing its XcelaSAN auto-tiering SSD ASAP. The interesting parts for me are in the last 5 minutes when we learn a bit more about its latency, IOPS and HA architecture. In my view the company should have published more details about these aspects of the product in a white paper a year or so ago. System architects need internal guides and modeling metrics to help them understand the strengths and weaknesses.

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"The ASAP uses its own intelligence to figure out data hot spots - and tries to ensure - that as often as possible - the data which you want from the slower, bigger store - is accessible to your servers."
...from the article - the New Business Case for SSD ASAPs
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SSD ad - click for more info
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will rental break through the indecision barrier for SSD ASAPs?
Editor:- January 26, 2012 - One of the business development obstacles facing enterprise SSD ASAP / caching vendors in the past few years has been that users have mostly thought of them as being HDD array accelerators.

And even if a user is interested right now - and even if they are happy with their try before you buy results - they often hold off making a purchase - because they think (after reading web sites like this one) that one day they'll be ripping out their rotating RAID systems and replacing them with SSDs - so it might be silly to buy an SSD cache appliance right now - if it only speeds up HDDs.

Now in reality - most users won't replace their entire HDD storage as quickly as they might like to think - and ASAPs do have a permanent role in the pure SSD datacenter too. Some vendors' marketing materials talk about that - while others are still harping on about hard disks and the "superiority" of SSD - even when their technology roadmap works just as well for SSD.
read the article on SSD ASAPs Seemingly breaking through the user indecision barrier - Dataram today published a customer story about their "no long term commitment" - Acceleration on Demand - leasing program. It sounds like a good idea - but I don't know the exact terms and conditions involved.
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flash SSD capacity - the iceberg syndrome
Have you ever wondered how the amount of flash inside a flash SSD compares to the capacity shown on the invoice?

What you see isn't always what you get.
nothing surprised the penguins - click to read  the article There can be huge variations in different designs as vendors leverage invisible internal capacity to tweak key performance and reliability parameters. ...read the article
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Dell will distribute Dataram's auto tiering SSD
Editor:- September 22, 2011 - Dataram announced that Dell OEM Solutions will manufacture, provide hardware customization, distribute and support Dataram's FC SAN compatible auto-tiering / SSD ASAP - the XcelaSAN from November 2011.

Editor's comments:- Since Dataram launched the XcelaSAN 2 years ago it has fixed perceived gaps in its failover characteristics and established some impressive customer reference sites. But sales have been slow.

Part of the problem has been that this product is aimed at users who don't have the technical resources within their workgroups to tune vanilla SSD accelerators in SANs because of the many complex data architecture decisions which then arise. That's why they need auto-tiering.

But without internal safety nets these ideal potential customers have to be absolutely confident that it works and will be supported.
read the article on SSD ASAPs This deal with Dell goes a long way to doing that - and will tip the balance for many who liked the idea but needed the reassurance that a 3rd party heavyweight company has looked at the design and is prepared to support it.
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the new SSD uncertainty principle
"enterprise MLC SSDs" - aren't all created equal

Editor:- July 25, 2011 - STEC is starting to lift the veil off how it manages MLC flash inside its enterprise and industrial SSDs. You're thinking - isn't it all the same? Just a variation on what SandForce and Fusion-io already do? (Only STEC is more expensive than SF, and not as fast as FIO...)

That's what I thought too - but I was wrong.
click to read the article This could be the start of new enterprise MLC branding wars in which SSD designers and memory makers battle it out to try and convince you that their own (different) way of doing enterprise MLC SSDs is better than all the others. ...read the article
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Dataram talks about blurring memory and storage
Editor:- May 19, 2011 - Dataram's Chief Technologist Jason Caulkins has written a new blog - Memory and Storage Technologies Begin to Blur in which he says new nv memories may render legacy hard disk interfaces obsolete by enabling most storage to fit in servers.

Jason is no stranger to this concept having designed a PCI SSD - called the Rocket Drive 10 years ago. But Dataram's current SSD appliance is very much a fibre-channel SAN animal - designed to work alongside legacy installed RAID arrays. Jason says in his blog the key enabler to these new architectures will be software.
Flash Memory My own view is that legacy hard disk DAS and NAS storage interfaces will continue to inter-operate with PCIe SSDs (and new faster SSD interfaces) even in a totally solid state world. I think storage in a complex enterprise will always be heirarchical - because different types of SSD will be optimized for different functions - and it won't be economic to use a one type fits all deployment.
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the Problem with Write IOPS

the "play it again Sam" syndrome
Editor:- Flash SSD "random write IOPS" are now similar to "read IOPS" in many of the fastest SSDs.

So why are they such a poor predictor of application performance?

And why are users still buying RAM SSDs which cost 9x more than SLC? - even when the IOPS specs look similar.
the problem with flash SSD  write IOPS This article tells you why the specs got faster - but the applications didn't. And why competing SSDs with apparently identical benchmark results can perform completely differently. ...read the article
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