NAS
NAS ..
AoE storage
AoE Storage
pcie  SSDs - click to read article
PCI Express SSDs ..

storagesearch.com

storage search
11 years - "leading the way to the new storage frontier"

4-bay  hot-swappable desktop AoE NAS storage - click for more info
AoE Enabler storage
4-bay desktop hot-swap AoE RAID
from JWE

bringing you iSCSI market news since 2001

iSCSI - simple intro
the SSD Buyers Guide
AoE / NAS / RAID / SAN / SAS
iSCSI Performance Myths Explained
Storage Market Outlook:- 2010 to 2015
the Problem with Write IOPS - in flash SSDs
the Benefits of SAS for External Subsystems
FCoE: Networks & Storage Convergence ( market overview)
Easyco enterprise flash SSD 1U, 2U or 3U silver or black
high IOPS solid state NAS
from EasyCo
... click to see larger iSCSI image
Terrorbyte liked testing fast rising
hot storage technologies.
network storage ad click for more info
iSCSI news
New Directory for AoE Storage

Editor:- January 15, 2010 - StorageSearch.com today published a new directory for AoE (ATA-over-Ethernet NAS Storage).

Although this NAS mode first hit our news pages in 2003 - support for it has been miniscule and compatible products are only available from a handful of vendors. Will 2010 be the year that it all changes? Maybe. SSDs could play a part - because less latency is wasted in this low level network storage interface.


2010 - 1st Fizz in the SSD Market Bubble

Editor:- January 12, 2010 - StorageSearch.com today published a new article - 2010 - 1st Fizz in the SSD Bubble.

I think SSD analysts will look back on 2010 as - "Year 1 of the SSD Market Bubble." Greed will play as big a part as technology in shaping the SSD year ahead. Wonder why? ...read the article


BlueArc Versus NetApp Benchmark

Editor:- November 10, 2009 - BlueArc today announced that its Mercury 100 storage system achieved SPEC sfs benchmark results that were 18% higher NetApp's FAS6080 (FCAL Disks) dual controller configuration, while using fewer disk drives for greater spindle efficiency.

See also:- Debunking "Tier Zero Storage", Calling for an End to Unrealistic SSD vs HDD IOPS Comparisons


Accusys Announces New iSCSI RAID

Editor:- October 12, 2009 - Accusys today announced a new range of rackmount IP SAN products.

Accusys iSCSI ExaRAID family includes 2U-12 bay, 3U-16 bay and 4U-24 bay RAID systems designed with active-active redundant controller support for high reliability and availability, link aggregation and jumbo frame support for maximizing bandwidth and performance over the Ethernet.

Dedupe Makes NAS SSD Affordable - says WhipTail's CTO
Editor:- October 12, 2009 - WhipTail Technologies became the 1st SSD appliance company to market integrated in-line deduplication.

At SNW WhipTail announced it will ship its newly renamed Racerunner (6TB) NAS SSDs with Exar's Hifn BitWackr deduplication and compression solution in Q4 2009. Racerunner has demonstrated deduplication performance in excess of 1Gbps.

James Candelaria, CTO of WhipTail Technologies said "Once again, we're proving Tier 0 storage doesn't have to be expensive. By providing in-line de-duplication, customers can save money by investing only in the storage they need."


Pillar's CEO Has Strong Views About SSDs

Editor:- September 29, 2009 - a lot of raw (and sometimes emotional) SSD soundbites emanating from DISKCON are quoted in an article written by Stephen Lawson and published yesterday in Techworld.

These colorful phrases are not the kind of toned down polite things which appear in a typical press release. There is real passion here.

My take is - when companies haven't braced themselves for a new market they are more likely to be disturbed by the waves which hit them. Human nature hasn't changed in the 97 years since that unsinkable ship went down - so why should hard diskophiles (lovers of hard disks - a new word I invented - so no need to look it up) be any different?


NetApp's Revenue Dips, Names New CEO

Editor:- August 19, 2009 - Network Appliance today named a new CEO.

Tom Georgens is the company's new president and CEO, succeeding Dan Warmenhoven, who led the company as CEO for the past 15 years. The transition in leadership, which is effective immediately, is the result of a management succession process. Georgens, 49, joined NetApp in October 2005 as executive vp and general manager of Enterprise Storage Systems.

NetApp also reported that revenue for the quarter ended July 31, 2009 declined 4% compared to a year ago.

Editor's comments:- 2 years ago NetApp was one of the world's fastest growing storage companies and you might have expected that its leading position in the analyst reported fast growing storage iSCSI market (at that time) would have protected its revenue growth - even in the adverse market which followed. But the company has become a laggardly follower rather than a leader in the critical iSCSI SSD market. That's clear to potential buyers - even if they aren't buying too many of those products right now.

Naming a new CEO now - at a low dip in the company's fortunes - means the new guy will look good when growth comes back. (If it does.)


Increasing the Usefulness of Cheap SSDs with Virtual SAN Software

Editor:- June 24, 2009 - Seanodes disclosed results of tests using entry level SSDs with its Exanodes virtual SAN software.

In an ESX environment of 8 servers with 1 SSD drive per server, IOmeter benchmark results showed 36,000 IOPS (random read 4K) for a system with an overall cost under $20K (including the cost of SSDs and Exanodes VM Edition).

"'Traditional arrays have been designed to work efficiently with spinning disks and can't give the promise of SSDs in terms of performance and scalability for example," said Frank Gana, Business Development Director at Seanodes. "This limits the usage and markets and as a consequence most people use them as Direct Attached Storage with all the usual known problems that come with DAS. Thanks to Exanodes and its innovative design we can aggregate and use SSDs efficiently, opening new markets and applications to this technology".

Editor's comments:- Seanodes says it's trying to fix the problem of aggregating and sharing multiple low capacity, low cost SSDs between servers without requiring special tuning skills. But I have to say the quoted IOPS don't sound impressive to me compared to the fastest SSDs. So why wouldn't you use less servers and a better SSD instead?

With so many other competing solutions in the rackmount SSD and PCIe SSD market - I suspect that Seanode's solution may only provide an economic price point for a tiny fragment of possible applications - or none at all. There isn't enough data in the press release to be sure.


Emulex says "No" to a future "Connecting everything®"

Editor:- May 4, 2009 - Emulex announced today it has rejected an unsolicited acquisition offer from Broadcom.

...Later:- May 5, 2009 - Broadcom extended the deadline for their offer and published a press release saying what a great deal it would be for shareholders. "Broadcom's all-cash offer is not subject to a financing condition. Broadcom intends to fund the offer with its existing cash holdings."

Emulex, in its rejection letter, had pointed to the potential value in recent design wins. Broadcom rubbished this assertion with this pithy analysis.

"... while Emulex has touted its "design wins" in its response to Broadcom and in other communications with the financial community, it has failed to demonstrate an ability to convert design wins into either revenue growth or market share. Over the last several years, including this most recent quarter, Emulex has continued to lose share to its larger competitor (QLogic)."

Editor's comments:- the FC, 10GbE and InfiniBand adapter markets used to be pivotal enabling tools for fast SANs in the enterprise server computing market. However, in recent times these network technologies have become commodities - and their prospects have waned..

As I've said before, the future of fast storage interconnects will be dominated by the requirements of the SSD market instead of the HDD market. Redeploying the intellectual property of these storage connections into closer proximity with solid state storage is something which the traditional HBA business model cannot achieve - or which takes too long.

Broadcom's mission statement "Connecting everything®" is more in line with the future vision of the computer market than the old-style duopoly of Emulex (and QLogic) which dominate a market that's going to become irrelevant.


Dell Joins iSCSI Compatible SSD Market

Editor:- March 25, 2009 - Dell announced SSD options for its iSCSI compatible EqualLogic PS6000 storage arrays.

Pricing starts at $25,000. This brings the number of rackmount SSD oems to 34. That number is expected to reach 300 in 2010.


StorMagic Launches Virtual iSCSI SAN Manager

Bristol, UK - February 18, 2009 - StorMagic today announced SvSAN - which helps small to mid-size organisations build a cost-effective virtual iSCSI SAN in just a few minutes.

The StorMagic SvSAN is designed to enable the deployment of a high-availability shared storage solution for VMware ESX environments for less than $2,000 allowing users to take advantage of enhanced server virtualisation functions without the need to purchase expensive shared storage. SvSAN supports upto 1,024 simultaneous sessions and 256 targets per appliance. For a limited time end-users can obtain a promo key for a free copy of SvSAN, with no expiration date. ...StorMagic profile


Nimbus Offers Drive Agnostic iSCSI

San Francisco, CA - February 9, 2009 - Nimbus Data Systems today announced the H-class RH100 quad port 10GbE unified storage system.

It offers up to 60x hot-swappable SATA (terabyte HDDs supported), SAS (450GB HDDs), or SSD drives (7.7TB capacity if populated by supported 128GB SSDs). Drives can be mixed within the same enclosure. The RH100 includes no-additional-charge snapshot, cloning, and replication software, built-in iSCSI SAN and NAS capabilities. The RH100 has a 4GB cache and 60Gbps internal bandwidth. Nimbus says it can be up and running in just 20 minutes. ...Nimbus profile, rackmount SSDs


a New Way to Instantly Rollback and Resume 24/7 Windows Apps

Santa Clara, Calif. - January 20, 2009 - Asempra Technologies today introduced its Business Continuity Appliance.

Designed for Microsoft environments the 2U rackmount iSCSI / FC SAN appliance (price $30,000) provides a Terabyte of storage which can be rolled back to any recovery point (with second by second resolution) and deliver data to applications within 30 seconds of a rollback being initiated, instead of hours or days with traditional D2d or tape backup systems. And unlike clustered servers or HA storage (which merely provide data continuity) Asempra's BCS can instantly restart from your chosen "good" data set - before a virus or software corruption occurred. ...Asempra Technologies profile

Editor's comments:-
$30,000 seemed like a steep price for a disk backup / recovery system - so I asked more about it.

One of the problems with this product is terminology. It sounds like a lot of other storage solutions - but is actually a different class of storage. The technical stuff on Asempra's site is clear and you will quickly recognize if it's the right product for your type of application. Like RAM SSDs - it's not for everybody.


StoneFly Lowers Cost of SAS IP SANs

Hayward, Calif. - December 10, 2008 - StoneFly, Inc. is now offering high-capacity SAS expansion for its S-Class model IP SANs.

This lowers the cost of expansion significantly: from $1.00 per GB previously, to $.80 per GB currently. In addition, customers can now increase expansion to up to 72 additional disks on some S-Class models. Another change announced today for the ISC line is that it now comes standard with 6 Gigabit Ethernet ports, or can be upgraded to support dual 10GbE connections. ...StoneFly profile


Sun Launches iSCSI Hybrid HDD / SSD Rackmount Storage

SANTA CLARA, Calif. - November 10, 2008 - Sun Microsystems, Inc. today announced the availability of its new 7000 family of rackmount storage systems - which includes hybrid HDD / flash SSD arrays.

Sun says its Solaris ZFS can use SSDs intelligently as a cache for both application and file system metadata, placing latency-critical data structures appropriately on flash media and using algorithms to optimize data placement. In addition, Solaris ZFS provides acceleration of both read and write operations, and lets administrators configure the system to match workload demands.

Among the products launched today the Sun Storage 7210 is a 4U 4 port GbE iSCSI compatible storage system which can be configured with 44TB of 7,200 RPM hard drives working alongside 36GB internal flash SSD and 64GB RAM. MSRP for this configuration is $117,995. ...Sun Microsystems profile, Hybrid Storage Drives, rackmount SSDs


MicroNet Ships Low Cost Unified SMB Storage

Torrance, CA - October 27, 2008 - MicroNet Technology today introduced its first unified NAS/iSCSI ipSAN-ready storage solution for the desktop SMB market with 5 hot swappable 3.5" drives.

Features include:- 2 Gigabit Ethernet ports with load balancing and failover, selective iSCSI target mode, RAID 0/1/5/6/10/JBOD/SPAN, 3 USB expansion ports and 1x eSATA port for storage and printer sharing. The MaxNAS is available immediately with an MSRP of $1,349 for a 2.5TB configuration, $1,699 for the 5TB model and $2,499 for the 7.5TB appliance. ...MicroNet profile, NAS


iSCSI vs FCoE Article in The Register

Editor:- October 15, 2008 - The Register has published a new article called -"iSCSI: Game Over?"

In it author Chris Mellor discusses how emerging vendor support for FCoE (the first adapters were shipped exactly a year ago) might ultimately affect the iSCSI market. Even if you're already heavily commited to fibre-channel SANs or the various flavors of NAS and have no plans to change soon - the article makes interesting reading.


iStor Unlocks High Availability Features in Installed iSCSI ASICs

IRVINE, Calif. - October 7, 2008 - iStor Networks, Inc. has begun shipping a new version of its software, v2.5, as a no-cost upgrade for all its iSCSI storage solutions.

This software will provide dual-controller iS512 systems with the ability to automatically detect malfunctions in the operational controller and to switch to the redundant controller without loss of data, function or performance.

"This new software capitalized on the patented capabilities of iStor's ASIC technology enabling HA capability with no impact upon system performance before, during or after a controller failure." said Jim Wayda, iStor's VP of Software Development. "iStor designed its controllers from the very beginning to deliver advanced functionality such as HA and we are very proud that we have been able to demonstrate the investment protection inherent in iStor's approach of implementation..." ...iStor profile, iSCSI, storage reliability
iSCSI companies
Aberdeen

Accusys

Adaptec

Agilent Technologies

Alacritech

AMI

ANStor64

Apcon

ApplianceWare

ArdisTech

Arena MaxTronic

Aristos Logic

Astute Networks

ATTO Technology

Axstor

BlueArc

Bridgeworks

Broadcom

Brocade

Bus-Tech

CebaTech

Cepoint Networks

Chelsio Communications

Ciprico

Cisco Systems

Cofio Software

Compellent

COPAN Systems

Crossroads Systems

Cutting Edge

Cybernetics

Database Appliances

DataCore Software

Datalink

Dell

D-Link

Dot Hill Systems

DSG Storage

Dynamic Network Factory

emBoot

EMC

Emulex

Enhance Technology

EqualLogic

European Storage Concept

Extreme Protocol Solutions

FalconStor Software

Fibrenetix

Finisar

Globalstor Data

HCL Technologies

Hifn

Hitachi Data Systems

HP

IBM

Infortrend

Intel

Intransa

iStor Networks

iVivity

JMR Electronics

Kano Technologies

LeftHand Networks

LeWiz

LightSand Communications

LSI

Lucent Technologies

M5 Data

MaXXan Systems

MicroNet Technology

Microsoft

Mountain View Data

MPC Computers

NEC

Neterion

NetEx

Network Appliance

Nexsan Technologies

Nimbus Data Systems

Novell

NSI Software

ONStor

Open-E

Overland Storage

Paralan

Pillar Data Systems

Plasmon

PMC-Sierra

Precision I/O

Proavio

QLogic

QSAN Technology

Quantum

RELDATA

Samsung Electronics

SANAT Technologies

SANRAD

Sans Digital

SAN Valley Systems

SBE

Sierra Logic

Silicom

SkyStorage

Snap Appliance

Spectra Logic

StarWind Software

StoneFly Networks

StoreAge

Storewiz

StorMagic

StraightLine

String Bean Software

Sun Microsystems

Systex

Tandberg Data

Tabernus

Tacit Networks

TechnoMages

Variel Technology

Wasabi Systems

Westek Technology

WhipTail Technologies

Wind River Systems

Zetera
still can't find it? check the acquired, dead & renamed list
Wherefore Art Thou iSCSI?

It's been nearly 9 years since STORAGEsearch.com launched this directory page dedicated to iSCSI way back in March 2001.

iSCSI had an optimistic, much hyped for but false start in its early years and became a graveyard for many startups including many wannabe iSCSI host bus adapter oems.

That segment of the iSCSI market became very lonely when VCs realized the market wasn't big enough to feed so many vendors and when some tuned software accelerators were promising nearly the same levels of performance (but without needing proprietary hardware).

In 2007 the iSCSI market reached $1 billion annualised revenue (approximately 3 years later than IDC had originally projected ).

The main reasons for iSCSI's painful delivery were:- slowness in the standard development process, early products which didn't work properly, and then finally, waiting for the sleeping giant called Microsoft to wake up and grasp the significance of the storage market.

But like Microsoft's late reaction to the world wide web - I think we can safely say the company has now got the idea about storage.

In mid 2007 the iSCSI market hotted up fueled by iSCSI benchmarks on 10Gbps Ethernet quoting faster IOPs than Fibre-channel SANs and the low costs which come from standardization. Users are hoping that iSCSI will be faster to run than FC without the setup complexity.

Where is iSCSI today?

In the 3 months leading upto February 2009 - pageviews for iSCSI SANs were 10% higher than those for FC SANs.

The FC SAN market isn't going to go away - there's too much legacy investment for that to happen. But the iSCSI market is where new network storage users are looking first to solve their problems. Recent announcements about iSCSI compatible SSD arrays also provide a route for better performance.

If you're interested in seeing historical snapshots of iSCSI history - try these links which take you to archived versions of this page (and the external pages too).
.
Brantley Coile - created the AoE protocol.
Find out more about people who have shaped storage history.
.
Top 20 Storage Articles - September 2009
  1. the Solid State Disks Buyers Guide
  2. the SSD Bookmarks
  3. War of the Disks: Hard Disk Drives vs. Flash SSDs
  4. the Fastest SSDs
  5. the Top 10 SSD OEMs
  6. SSD Myths and Legends - "write endurance"
  7. NAS, DAS or SAN? - Choosing the Technology
  8. Flash Memory vs. Hard Disks - Which Will Win?
  9. the Benefits of SAS for External Subsystems
  10. RAM SSDs versus Flash SSDs - which is Best?
  11. Overview of the Notebook SSD Market
  12. Are MLC SSDs Ever Safe in Enterprise Apps?
  13. A Storage Architecture Guide
  14. After SSDs... What Next?
  15. What's a Solid State Disk?
  16. Can you trust flash SSD specs & benchmarks?
  17. LVD, SE, HVD, SCSI compatibility - or lack of it
  18. 3 Easy Ways to Enter the SSD Market
  19. 2009 - Year of SSD Market Confusion?
  20. Z's Laws - Predicting Flash SSD Performance
.
Megabyte's Storage Directories

1.8" SSDs

2.5" SSDs

Analysts - SSD market

Analysts - storage market

Animal brands in storage

Backup software

Boxes / Enclosures / JBODs

Chips - storage processors etc

Data recovery

Disk to disk backup

Disk sanitizers

Duplicators - optical (DVD etc)

Duplicators - HDD / SSD

Events

ExpressCard SSDs

Fastest SSDs

Fibre-channel HBAs

Fibre-Channel SSDs

FireWire storage

Flash Memory

Flash SSDs

Gone away companies

Hard disk drives

History (of data storage)

Hybrid Drives

Industry trade associations

InfiniBand

iSCSI

Jargon - re RAID

Jargon - re flash SSD

Jukeboxes

Marketing Views

Market research

Military storage

NAS

Notebook SSDs

Online Backup

Optical drives

PCIe SSDs

People

Popular Products

Publications - other storage

Rackmount SSDs

RAID controllers

RAID systems

RAM / RAM-based SSDs

Record breaking storage

Reliability

Removable drives

SAN

SAS storage / SAS SSDs

SATA storage / SATA SSDs

SCSI adapters

Security

Services

Software

SSDs

SSD controller chips & IP

Switches (storage)

Tape drives / Tape libraries

Test Equipment

Training

USB storage

VARS (storage) - USA

VARS (storage) - UK

VARS (storage) - Japan

VC funds in storage
.

storage search banner

1.0" SSDs 1.8" SSDs 2.5" SSDs 3.5" SSDs rackmount SSDs PCIe SSDs SATA SSDs
SSDs all flash SSDs hybrid drives flash memory RAM SSDs SAS SSDs Fibre-Channel SSDs

StorageSearch.com is published by ACSL