|
see also:-
Dataram
- editor mentions on STORAGEsearch.com
- editor's comments:- 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.."*
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.
See
more about this in the article on the right which appeared on our
SSD news page at the time.
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."
*
...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.
See also:-
SSD Market
History
|
| Dataram
Eliminates Waits for the SSD Hot-Shot Hot-Spot Engineer |
Editor:- September 28, 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 for the new
SSD ASAP starts at
$65,000 for a unit with approx 360GB internal flash, of which 128GB is
effectively used as a cache.
"It is now well understood that the
benefit of a solid state infrastructure for compute-intensive environments is
higher application performance with less equipment and lower operational costs,"
said Jason Caulkins, Dataram Chief Technologist. "The question is no longer
'How can I benefit from solid state storage?' but 'How do I best implement solid
state in my existing infrastructure?' With XcelaSAN, we enable organizations
with performance intensive applications to seamlessly add a dynamic, intelligent
solid state storage tier to their existing SAN environment."
Editor's
comments:- At 1st glance this product looks like many others which have
aimed at the traditional market of SAN users. But its revolutionary design opens
a new market which has been inaccessible to traditional
FC SSD vendors.
Dataram's product includes proprietary software - which does away with the need
for an SSD expert engineer to identify hotspots and relocate critical data. The
company says the XcelaSAN will automatically learn and self optimize during the
1st few hours of operation - and it will maintain application speedups even
when applications and loads change - which is not possible with human tuned
systems.
The search for a self
tuning agnostic
SSD software layer which sits between a SAN server and conventional rotating
disk bulk storage has been the Holy Grail of SSD oems for over a decade. None
have actually achieved it - till now. Although many vendors have developed
semi-automated tuning kits and strategies for common applications - they require
considerable expertise on the part of the applications engineer to make them
work well. That has slowed down the adoption rate of SSDs in many midsized
organizations which don't have a big enough installed base to attract the star
SSD talent to look at their problems. And it's also why SSD accelerators, have
not been viable as a reseller product.
When I spoke to Dataram's CTO,
Jason Caulkins, I was impressed by the depth of marketing thinking behind the
new product launch.
Dataram realized that simply launching a me-too SSD box would have an
uncertain outcome in a market that's already so crowded. And Dataram's corporate
memory goes back over 30 years to pioneering SSDs for minicomputers which
they launched in
1976. But
all memory companies know that in the future SSDs will use more memory than
traditional markets - such as server or pc motherboards. So it's important to
stake out ground in the SSD market.
I asked - where did the technology
come from? Jason said some of it came from Dataram's acquisition of
Cenatek - where he had
already been thinking about the SSD business model problem for many years. With
much bigger resources available after Dataram's acquisition - he's had teams of
software engineers working on the XcelaSAN concepts and licensed essential glue
where needed.
Will it work? Dataram says the XcelaSAN has been tested
and working in customer sites. Product shipments in the US start in the next
quarter. And the product is storage agnostic - meaning the customer can replace
their SAN arrays at a future date and retain the acceleration speedup. XcelaSAN
seems to offer a viable route for mid-budget user enterprises - who have
been neglected by SSD vendors for economic reasons - to join the march of the
SSD Revolution. |
 |
Is it competitive? - If you
use my quick and dirty magic number for SSD sever accelerators - (write IOPS
divided by cost per TB) - it's in the same order of magnitude as leading
PCIe SLC flash SSD cards - so it's definitely worth a look. | | |
|
| |
