| iSCSI
SSD news |
Drobo's new SSD ASAP uses
SAS SSDs from OCZ
Editor:- March 8, 2012 - OCZ
announced that its Talos
SSDs (3.5"
SAS SSDs) will be
used in Drobo's
new B1200i
range of iSCSI
auto-tiering systems (SSD
ASAPs).
This is Drobo's first product to leverage the benefits
of SSDs.
"Just like larger organisations, SMEs should be able to
afford and enjoy the benefits of SSD technology and performance," said Tom Buiocchi,
CEO of Drobo. "For the best capacity and performance, our unique
automated
data-aware tiering allows customers to easily and affordably add SSDs to the
same Drobo environment that already has high-capacity traditional disk drives."
GreenBytes launches its first pure SSD rack
Editor:-
February 21, 2012 - GreenBytes
announced imminent availability of its first pure SSD based storage array.
The
Solidarity is a
high availability
iSCSI 3U rackmount SSD
with real-time dedupe and
compression with upto 13.5TB raw capacity (60TB effective) and 120,000 4K
IOPS performance.
Matt
Aitkenhead, VP, Sales of GreenBytes said "Solidarity provides a
complete SSD-powered, single-tier solution for primary storage and
virtualization missions that removes complexity and provides orders of magnitude
increases of performance and capacity, which are true game changers in the
mid-market storage arena."
WhipTail gets more funding
Editor:- January 17, 2012
- WhipTail
today
announced
it has secured a Series B funding round led by RRE
Ventures, with Ignition Partners
and Spring Mountain Capital
also participating.
The new funds will be used to increase resources in
sales and marketing.
WhipTail says over 100 customers have installed
its enterprise SSD arrays and over 1/3 of the company's revenue comes from
repeat business.
NexGen enters iSCSI auto-tiering SSD ASAP market
Editor:-
November 8, 2011 - NexGen
emerged from stealth mode and
announced
general availability of its first product - the
n5 - a 3U
iSCSI
auto-tiering and
real-time compression appliance - which internally leverages 48GB
RAM cache,
1.3TB PCIe SSD and
32TB raw SAS
HDD capacity to deliver
120TB RAID protected
usable fast virtual storage with adjustable performance QoS for every volume.
SolidFire gets more funding for iSCSI cloud SSDs
Editor:-
October 25, 2011 - SolidFire
announced that it has
raised
$25 million in its second funding round, bringing its total funding to $37
million.
SolidFire's founder and CEO, Dave Wright said - "The
response to our Early Access Program... has been overwhelming. We have a very
solid sales pipeline and we will be investing in our sales and marketing team to
respond to customer interest and accelerate our growth."
Editor's
comments:- The raw building block in SolidFire's product -
the SF 3010 (pdf)
- is a 1U system with 10 internal
2.5" SSDs (giving
3TB raw capacity) and with 72GB
RAM cache.
See
also:- iSCSI SSDs
and cloud storage.
SDS shrinks SSD IOPS in VMware
Editor:- September 15,
2011 - the use of
SSDs
with VMware has popped up in these news pages in recent years more times
than I care to count. But I got a new angle on this a few days ago in a
discussion with Linda LaPorta,
President of Superior
Data Solutions .
Now you may ask - who is SDS? (the spelling is
important here) and what do they know about SSDs? (It had been several
years since I last heard from them too.) But you've all heard about
STEC's ZeusIOPS - right?
- Well SDS was
selling this particular enterprise flash SSD design in 2006 - before STEC
acquired it from Gnutek.
An SDS platform was also one of
Sun's early SSD offerings
too. But SDS have switched focus from raw hardware to applications - and they
are the US distributor for a product called
VirtualStorm.
Linda
LaPorta told me - "...Our software is changing the game in VDI. Right now
IOPs is a big barrier to the acceptance of VDI because the cost to implement
storage can be very high. (Windows 7 users are figuring 24-28 IOPs per VM…gets
pricey if you need to provision HDAs for 10,000). We need a fast IO device to
store the virtual applications. We like a fast SSD, but it only needs to be 100
to 200GB. It is a read only drive that stores the master image of each
application. All the VM's go to a well cached
raid system. This is
where we reduce the IOPs to 2-4 /VM and we keep the capacity requirement
to 3GB/per VM (which is actually making it AFFORDABLE to consider all SSD
instead of HDDs)..."
ESG publishes test report on WhipTail's iSCSI SSD
Editor:-
August 31, 2011 -Enterprise
Strategy Group has
published
a test report on WhipTail
Technologies' 2U iSCSI
SSD appliance in a simulated 300 desktop VMware / W7 environment.
Applications
ran glitch free - even when a flash drive was removed. ESG didn't have fast
enough servers to stress test the performance - so they only verified 90% of
the rated 250K IOPS.
Nimbus SSDs dedupe eBay
Editor:- August 2, 2011 -Nimbus Data Systems
announced that eBay has deployed more than 100 terabytes of Nimbus S-Class flash
memory to power its VMware virtual server infrastructure.
The Nimbus
solution delivered near line-rate 10 Gbps
iSCSI performance to the
VMware hosts while consuming 78% less energy and 50% less rackspace than
conventional disk-based
solutions.
Editor's comments:- eBay has been using SSDs to accelerate its
infrastructure for over 10 years using systems from various suppliers.
Click here to
read about an earlier eBay SSD story from 2000.
Demartek publishes free 86 page iSCSI guide
Editor:-
May 31, 2011 - Demartek
has published an
iSCSI
Deployment Guide (86 pages pdf) aimed at users in Windows environments.
The
company says
- "This guide is intended to be used as a reference and is divided into
sections including iSCSI marketplace data, iSCSI technology areas, and specific
vendor products in the area of network adapters and storage targets. There are
screen shots and information from actual deployments of these products."
StoneFly accelerates iSCSI with Fusion-io
Editor:-
March 30, 2011 -StoneFly
announced
that it will integrate Fusion-io's ioMemory
accelerators into its iSCSI
storage systems.
"By marrying our software with Fusion's cards,
we provide customers with the possibility of creating a fully scalable, high
availability, and high performance IP SAN storage system," says Mo Tahmasebi,
StoneFly's President and CEO . "We are very excited to introduce this first
of its kind breakthrough product line."
Alacritech enters SSD ASAP market
Editor:- January
11, 2011 - Alacritech
launched
the ANX
1500 ($70,000 base price) - a 2U
fat flash
SSD ASAP optimized
for the NAS market - which
the company claims can deliver 120,000 NFS OPS when configured with 48GB of
DRAM and up to 4TB flash SSD.
Ampex ships rugged iSCSI SSD
Editor:- October 19,
2009 - Ampex
announced first customer shipments of the TuffServ 480 SSD - a rugged
iSCSI SSD for airborne
applications to General Atomics.
The
TuffServ 480 provides
2TB of RAID protected hot swappable flash storage in a conduction cooled
MIL-STD-810F certified compact package measuring 5.25" H x 7.25" W x
10" D.
"Higher performance, smaller size, and lighter weight,
and all at a lower cost," is the way that Business Development Manager John
Hardy described Ampex' s new airborne solid-state server system. "The
TuffServ 480 system is specifically designed to meet our customers ever growing
data acquisition needs." |
| SSD market
history - (35 years of technical product milestones) |
|
| | |
|
| . |
|
|
| . |
| world's
first iSCSI SSD (announcement) |
Editor:- September 7, 2004 - BiTMICRO today
announced
that they will be introducing
solid state disk-based iSCSI
target appliances.
BiTMICRO is responding to the growing market demand
for a consolidated, interoperable and manageable flash-based network storage
solution that is scalable over long distances, provides easy connectivity to
SANs, allows shared access for multiple users and handles existing user
applications with ease. Under this initiative, BiTMICRO will introduce a
family of iSCSI target appliances that fuses several dominant standards, IP and
Ethernet for networking and SCSI for data storage. Integrating this solution
into existing storage networks allows business enterprises to reap the benefits
of SAN without getting bogged down by distance and cost limitations associated
with Fibre Channel solutions.
Editor's comments:- the above
product never got to market as I found out a few years later.
Earlier
- market analyst IDC had
predicted that the iSCSI market would be worth $1 billion / year revenue in 2004
- but due to a variety of
factors it would be another 3 years before that revenue milestone happened.
And the SSD market was slower taking off than expected too. | | |
| . |
|
|
| . |
| this way to the Petabyte
SSD |
In 2016 there will be
just 3 types of
SSD in the datacenter.
One
of them doesn't exist yet - the bulk storage SSD.
It will replace the
last remaining strongholds of
hard drives in the
datacenter due to its unique combination of characteristics, low running costs
and operational advantages. |
 |
... |
The new model of the
datacenter - how we get from here to there - and the technical problems which
will need to be solved - are just some of the ideas explored in this
visionary article. | | | |
| . |
| the Top 20 SSD companies |
Editor:- Which companies do
you absolutely have to include in your thinking if you've got any new
projects involving SSDs?
And which SSD companies are most likely
to succeed?
With hundreds of manufacturers already in the SSD
market - and hundreds
more soon to enter
- you have to know where you should prioritize your valuable time and
attention.
For 4 years
StorageSearch.com has published the
quarterly list of the Top 10 SSD companies - which has accurately predicted the
ebbs and flows of existing vendors and has been sensitive enough to recognize
the industry's new rising stars from the background noise of the
SSD bubble's hype.
Unlike
editor or analyst
pick lists - this is based on the scientific method of tracking and analyzing
the search volume of the most important people who will decide the future of
the SSD market - the millions of people - who like you have been reading our SSD
content.
Each edition of the list includes a list of the top companies
and a review an analysis of key SSD market milestones in that quarter. By
comparing successive listings you can also see - who is on the way up and who is
on the way down.
The listings have been recently expanded to include
the top 20 SSD companies. |
 |
This gives you better
visibility of companies are hot on the heels of the leaders in top market
segments. ...read
the article | | | |
| ... |
| SSD Pricing -
where does all the money go? |
| SSDs are among the most
expensive computer hardware products you will ever buy and comprehending 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!
Why is that? ...read the article to
find out | | | |
| ... |
| |
|
