|
|
| . |
Who's
who in SSD? - by Zsolt Kerekes,
editor - November 28, 2011
Here's the short of it
Kove (a
top 20 SSD company)
markets the fastest rackmount SSD appliance available in a 4U form factor. If
you're researching products in this performance category you should also take a
look at
Texas Memory Systems,
Violin Memory and
Fusion-io.
Here's
the long version
Kove is 1 of 15 companies in the
fastest SSDs list,
and 1 of about 20 companies listed in the
RAM SSDs directory and
it's also in the top 20
SSD companies list. Kove is also listed in these guides too:-
FC SAN SSDs and
InfiniBand storage and
SSDs.
There's a growing realization in the enterprise market that
RAM SSDs will be a permanent part of the SSD toolkit in high transaction
volume datacenters which have any kind of traditional hierarchical data
architecture. And the only reason for buying them is to solve problems which
flash SSDs create or can't solve technically because of RAM's superior
latency, bandwidth, truly symmetric
IOPS,
better reliability (and sometimes lower floor price).
Kove's
Xpress Disk embodies how fast you can
go in an FC SAN /
IB connected RAM
storage appliance - with 8 microsends latency and nearly 30 gigabytes / s
bandwidth.
Who can afford this?
Most of you can't.
But if you're in the financial services industry and want an edge on
competitors delivering real-time market data - this is the type of product you
can't afford not to look at. Especially as it was recently (Oct 2011) shown
to be 12x faster than the previous fastest storage system when
performing a Market Snapshot
benchmark.
I currently
talk to more than 300 makers of SSDs and another 100 or so companies
which are closely enmeshed around the SSD ecosphere - which are all profiled
here on the mouse site.
I learn about new SSD companies every day,
including many in stealth mode. If you're interested in the growing
big picture of
the SSD market canvass - StorageSearch will help you along the way. Many
SSD company CEOs read our site too - and say they value our thought leading SSD
content - even when we say something that's not always comfortable to hear. I
hope you'll find it it useful too. |
| . |
|
|
In November 2010 -
Kove demonstrated a 4U
InfiniBand &
FC compatible
RAM SSD product line
called Xpress Disk - which can sustain
20GB/s throughput via 6x InfiniBand ports.
In June 2011 -
Kove announced that its
XPD2 4U 2TB RAM SSD had achieved the following performance:- 11.7 Million IOPS
in a single addressable space, 28.5GB/s bandwidth, along with round trip latency
of 6 microseconds for read and 8 microseconds for writes.
"The
next generation Kove Xpress Memory Disk is a continuation of our leadership in
high performance storage for those customers who need the absolute fastest
storage system available," states John Overton, Kove CEO. "The XPD2
connects directly to storage fabrics via standard Fibre Channel and InfiniBand
interconnects, while increasing performance density way beyond any other similar
storage alternatives."
In October 2011 -
Kove's
XPD2 was 12x faster than the
previous fastest system - in the Market Snapshot
benchmark audited by STAC. |
|
| |
| "Bottlenecks in
the pure SSD datacenter will be much more serious than in the HDD world -
because responding slowly will be equivalent to transaction failure." |
| Editor:- from a
blog on the home page | | |
| ..... |
|
|
| . |
| "There's growing
confidence in the SSD industry that all new enterprise storage drives will be
solid state one day. But the value propositions and customer adoption rates are
different between SSD accelerators (replace servers) and bulk SSD arrays
(replace HDD RAID)." |
| ...from
SSD vs HDD? | | |
| . |
|
|
| . |
 |
| . |
 |
| . |
|
|
| . |
| "In many bank
applications RAM SSDs are actually cheaper than flash - because of the small
size of the data. Production bank systems are typically shared by many hosts
and get a lot of write IOPS / capacity. To achieve the same reliability and
latency with flash would require over provisioning which would drive the cost
up." |
| Jamon Bowen,
Director of Sales Engineering for Texas Memory Systems
in an interview about the decision
tipping points between RAM and flash SSDs. | | | |
