|
|
|
|
|
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ..... |
| ||||||
|
storage news - 2007, November week 2 | |||||
| SSD Bookmarks the Fastest SSDs the SSD Heresies SSD Jargon Explained high availability enterprise SSDs size matters! - in SSD controller architecture | ||||||
 | ||||||
| DataDirect
Scales to hundreds of gigabytes/ second Chatsworth, Calif - November 14, 2007 - DataDirect Networks today announced that the company's 8th generation S2A appliance will enable CFS/SUN's Lustre I/O to reach several hundred gigabytes / second. DataDirect Networks manufactures the fastest, highest capacity, most scalable Lustre-based storage systems on the planet. Lustre, taken from the words "Linux" and "cluster," is a distributed file system used for large scale cluster computing. The file system, which was acquired by Sun Microsystems in October, was designed to scale to tens of thousands of nodes that are attached to petabytes of storage. The main advantage of the file system is that it does not compromise a storage system's speed or security. New features built into the latest S2A appliance include support for 8Gbps Fibre Channel and 20Gbps Infiniband DDR host connections. The system leverages the serial attached SCSI protocol to communicate to the drives it manages, providing a future-proof roadmap to the latest disk drive technologies, speeds and capacities. the fastest SSDs, SAN switches, Record Breaking Storage SanDisk Uneils PCIe Flash SSD NEW YORK, N.Y - November 13, 2007 - SanDisk today unveiled a PCIe compatible flash SSD. The new SanDisk Vaulter, which is intended for use as a an embedded hard disk accelerator in laptops and desktops, will be offered to OEMs early next year in capacities from 8GB to 16GB. ...SanDisk profile Editor's comments:- currently 8 SSD oems offer products with PCIe interfaces with a wide range of capacity and speed options. For the list see the PCIe SSD guide. Solix Introduces Enterprise Data Management Suite for Siebel Sunnyvale, California - November 13, 2007 - Solix Technologies today announced Solix Enterprise Data Management Suite for Siebel. Solix EDMS enables companies to more efficiently classify, manage and secure Siebel CRM applications, maintain information governance, implement tiered storage strategies and consolidate data. Solix EDMS is pre-populated with the metadata for Siebel as well as for related Oracle products. Among many other functions Solix Secure Test and Development allows organizations to automatically create database copies while masking sensitive data in non-production environments for improved security, faster test and development cycles, and reduced storage costs. ...Solix profile, Storage Software STEC Incredibly Sees No SSD Competitors SANTA ANA, Calif - November 13, 2007 - STEC, Inc. announced today its financial results for the 3rd quarter ended September 30, 2007. Revenue was $44.7 million, a decrease of 16.9% from the year ago quarter and essentially flat (increase of 2.3%) sequentially. STEC's CEO, Manouch Moshayedi said "Despite various announcements from other potential SSD manufacturers and the subsequent misunderstanding and misinterpretations by analyst reports, we do not see any competition currently in the ZeusIOPS portion of our business nor have we seen any announcements which indicate any potential competitors might be introducing an SSD with similar performance as our ZeusIOPS anytime during 2008. Furthermore we have not received any feedback from our customers who are currently qualifying our ZeusIOPS SSDs that a competitor has given them any indication that they might be introducing a product similar to our ZeusIOPS. "We achieved an 81% or $15.8 million increase in our order backlog during the 3rd quarter of 2007 driven primarily by increased SSD orders... We believe that our SSD technology is clearly the leading technology for Enterprise-level applications." ...STEC profile Editor's comments:- Speaking as one of those "misinterpreting analysts" in August 2007 I said "...STEC sounded much too complacent about its technology lead and lack of competition in the enterprise server SSD market" and I went on to name specific competitors in their company profile page. That's still my view today. STEC's results show a company with apparently declining revenue for products it can ship and increased demand for promised products which it can't. That's a vulnerable situation to be in - made riskier by their CEO's stated view about competition in their market segment. In my view it shows either a Clintonesque interpretation about the exact nature of the words being used which I'll paraphrase as - "we see no SSD competition" - or a blinkered approach. How many clicks does it take to get to STORAGEsearch.com's SSD pages - if you're looking for info about the SSD market? Millions of SSD pageviews suggest it's not that difficult. SSDs don't have to look exactly the same as those from STEC to replace their role and do the same job. If not in their own customers' slots - then in the slots of other oems who are competing with STEC's customers. The market will decide and in my view customers have a bigger choice than STEC seems to acknowledge. Until the company takes that on board - I have to doubt some of what they say regarding their rosy long term outlook. High revenue growth for a market segment (SSDs) does not guarantee that all vendors in that market will do equally well. Market awareness and marketing skills are more important than before - when this was a techie market with fewer competing vendors and a smaller market to play for. ...Later:- when I queried this STEC told me that the quote from their CEO in the earnings press release above related to a very specific discussion about a particular product and competitor. I got a very long explanation as a result of which I'm satisfied that STEC are aware of their competition but have been extremely careless in their marketing communications. BiTMICRO Unveils 1.6 Terabyte 3.5" Flash SSDs Supercomputing 2007, Reno, NV - November 13, 2007 - BiTMICRO Networks, Inc. announced it will sample a terabyte class flash SSD in Q1 2008 and will ship in volume by Q2 2008. The 3.5-inch 4Gb Fibre Channel E-Disk Altima E3F4FL will be availabe with capacity upto 1.6 terabytes and is expected to deliver sustained rates of more than 230MBps and upwards of 55,000 IOPS. ...BiTMICRO profile, flash SSDs Editor's comments:- no real surprises here, although it's good to get the details. This was predicted in my article published in June - 3.5" Terabyte Solid State Disks Later:- when this product did eventually appear it was 464GB (SLC) in a 1" high in a 3.5"SSD form factor. SEPATON Launches Fast Petabyte VTL Marlborough, MA - November 13, 2007 - SEPATON. today launched the S2100-ES2 Series 750 virtual tape library which scales to 1.2 petabytes uncompressed (or up to 60PB with compression and DeltaStor dedupe). The ES2 can perform backups and restores at a rate of 34.5TB/hour. Pricing starts at $59,000. "We recognized that our very large enterprise customers have unique requirements that no other VTL on the market could address," said Miklos Sandorfi, CTO, SEPATON, Inc. "We designed the new Series 750 with the speed, de-duplication efficiency and capacity scaling that they require." Plasmon Names New CEO Cambridge, UK - November 13, 2007 - Plasmon today announced the appointment of Steven Murphy to the position of CEO effective today. Murphy, a seasoned executive with more than 20 years of experience in the storage and systems management industry will be based in the U.S. to drive the roll-out of Plasmon's UDO2 based Archive Appliance. As president and CEO of Softek he led the company¹s change from a niche player to a market leader and led the management buyout of Softek from Fujitsu Ltd. to its acquisition by IBM in January 2007. Prior to founding Softek, Mr. Murphy was president of Amdahl Software, Inc. as well as holding executive roles in the enterprise software and telecommunications industries, including Andersen Consulting....Plasmon profile, Storage People Editor's comments:- looks like Plasmon has acquired a CEO who could help them get acquired. WiebeTech Launches Low Cost Disk eRazer WICHITA , KS - November 12, 2007 - WiebeTech today unveiled its Drive eRazer family for IDE/PATA and SATA hard drives. The standard model (price $99.95) can erase a 250GB drive in under 2 hours. Operation is easy. Simply connect it to a drive and flip a switch. "As many people discover too late, trashing a file does not erase it from a hard drive," said James Wiebe, president/CEO of WiebeTech. "It is fairly easy for someone else to recover files from used hard drives. As a test, we bought used drives on eBay and recovered everything from corporate data to email conversations to financial data to legal documents. Drive eRazer is the easiest, most economical solution available to prevent others from seeing your files." ...WiebeTech profile, Disk Sanitizers New Memory Upgrades for Sun Ultra 24 Princeton, NJ - November 13, 2007 - Dataram announce the availability of 2GB and 4GB memory upgrades for Sun's Ultra 24 Workstations. Dataram's DRSX2100M2/2GB and DRSX2100M2 upgrades each consists of a matched pair of 1GB or 2GB DDR2-667/PC2-5300 ECC Unbuffered DIMMs. ...Dataram profile, RAM AMCC Reduces Price of Fast Desktop RAID SUNNYVALE, Calif - November 12, 2007 - AMCC today announced a $400 price reduction for its 3ware Sidecar. Education customers may also take advantage of an additional $100 reduction when they buy directly from AMCC. The 4 bay desktop system delivers speeds up to 4x faster than eSATA and up to 28x faster then USB solutions. "The 3ware Sidecar generated a lot of excitement this year and enjoyed consistently outstanding reviews, largely because of its unique ability to provide our customers very high performance RAID protection in a convenient, easy-to-use desktop box," said Scott Cleland, Director of Marketing for AMCC Storage. "We're offering these reductions to make enterprise-class RAID protection accessible to a wider audience which now includes students and home enthusiasts..." ...AMCC profile Storage Markets Says Goodbye Editor:- November 12, 2007 - Storage Markets today concluded its experiment of predicting trends and transitions in the storage industry. First launched in October 2006, the publication / market research site says that over 560 storage industry professionals and end users participated with insights and opinions. Here at the mouse site - we have our own way of predicting things - based on analyzing the storage search behaviour of over 1 million readers and feeding that into ScryWare. ...gone away storage companies New Report - Understanding the NAND Flash Market Los Gatos, CA - November 9, 2007 - Objective Analysis has introduced a report called - Understanding the NAND Flash Market. This 55-page report (price $4,000) explains how and why this technology has been able to grow so quickly (to become a $16 billion market in less than 10 years) and projects what is likely to occur over the next 5 years. It profiles NAND makers and users, explains the cost dynamics governing manufacturing, and evaluates end markets and market drivers. "There has never been a report that pulls together all the elements of NAND business dynamics to make them clear to NAND makers, buyers, sellers, or investors," said Jim Handy, author of the report. "This document explains price, cost, capacity, and demand, and shows how they all work together to produce oversupplies, undersupplies, and the price collapses for which this market is notorious." ...Objective Analysis profile ExaGrid Secures $20 million Disk Backup Funding Westborough, Mass - November 8, 2007 - ExaGrid Systems, Inc. today announced that it has received an additional $20 million of funding led by new investor Lehman Brothers Venture Partners. The round, which also includes current investors Highland Capital Partners and Sigma Partners, supports ExaGrid's expansion of sales and marketing activities in North America, Europe and Asia, and is expected to fund ExaGrid to cash positive status. Managing Director at Lehman, Brian Paul said "ExaGrid's unique approach to disk-based backup with post-process byte-level data de-duplication and a grid-based architecture for scalability is clearly giving customers what they need as they move from tape to disk for backup. We are excited to participate in the company's ongoing success." ...ExaGrid profile, Storage VCs |
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ......................................................................................................................... | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| storage history (1949 till last week) | STORAGEsearch | SPARC Product Directory | ACSL - the publisher |
