Intel & STMicro Sample Phase Change Memory - storage news 2008, February week 1

Storage news - 2008, February week 1

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	10 years editing the storage news on STORAGEsearch.com hadn't aged Megabyte. He looked just the same as when he started.

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Storage news

Intel & STMicro Sample Phase Change Memory

ONStor Reports 3rd Year of 100% Growth

It's Groundhog Day (Again) for 8Gbps Fibre Channel HBAs

STORAGEsearch.com Reports Top Storage Searches

eDiscovery Companies Find Mutual Interests

Intel and Micron Unveil Fastest Flash Memory

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You're Never More than 20 Feet Away from a Rat

Editor:- February 4, 2008 - if you substitute "hard drive" for "rat" in the headline above - you'll understand why the hard disk industry is having such a good time at the moment and why Western Digital's recently announced 46% hard drive revenue growth didn't prevent Seagate too having a double digit growth quarter.

When I started STORAGEsearch.com back in 1998 - the computer industry accounted for nearly every hard disk in use but it was clear that would change and in an article 6 years ago I said why (according to my simple analysis) I thought the entertainment market would eventually lead to the coming of the terabyte storage box in the home. That's becoming a commonplace reality today. (Some analysts such as Tom Coughlin, President of Coughlin Associates and events such as Storage Visions have been tracking that paradigm shift with more detailed predictions and reports if you need them.)

With hard disks now appearing in DVRs, cameras, music players, cars and even mobile phones - the mass storage market is no longer the zero sum game it once was. If manufacturer X sells more disks into the notebook PC market, it doesn't stop manufacturer Y selling more (very similar) disks into a new emerging market for entertainment gadgets.

Although we haven't yet reached the stage where you are no more than 20 feet away from a hard disk drive - we are getting very close. Not there yet in my home - because some of the entertainment delivery boxes run off wireless networks.

As to rats? - my own experience is that the 20 feet rule is often true.

I've got 2 "active" 4 year old cats who love eating rats - but prefer dining at home. As they have demolished all the stupid rats close to the house I often see them coming from as far as 2 fields away - with a little wriggling rodent. Then I hear the snap of the cat flap - followed by a familiar scurrying sound.

Rats are smart and often pretend to be dead - at which stage the cats lose interest - and I have to get involved. Or if the rat escapes me - I'll just shut the cats in the room for a few hours until they get hungry and rediscover it.

What's more disturbing is when (as in the movie Aliens) the scurrying sound comes from the ceiling above you.

In the coldest nights of winter the boldest of the local rats (which haven't yet had their heads chewed off) crawl up the outside walls and discover the joys of a living in the roof space. When you hear the scratching sounds above the ceiling at 4am - you may wish optimistically that it's a squirrel or bird which has got lost - but you know deep down that it's rats. That's when the bad dreams begin. From the practical point of view - they sometimes go away - and you don't hear from them again. But if I hear them 2 nights running then I set a few packs of rat poison - and the problem is solved for another year.

Last week I spent a couple of days in the roof space as I was improving the insulation. The typical rat runs of past residents were evident in many places.

As to the Byte family rodents... Megabyte says he's not a rat but a mouse. I don't want to upset him (and he doesn't read my columns so he may not find out) but that tail design was modeled on a big fat rat which used to hang around the chickens back in the summer he was born.

SANTA CLARA, Calif - February 6, 2008 - Intel Corp and STMicroelectronics reached a key industry milestone today as they began shipping prototype samples of a future product using a new, innovative memory technology called Phase Change Memory. The 128M bit prototypes are the first functional silicon to be delivered to customers for evaluation, bringing the technology one step closer to adoption. The memory device, codenamed "Alverstone" uses PCM, a promising new memory technology providing very fast read and write speeds at lower power than conventional flash, and allows for bit alterability normally seen in RAM.

"This is the most significant non-volatile memory advancement in 40 years," said Ed Doller, CTO-designate of Numonyx, the new name for the pending STMicroelectronics and Intel flash memory company. "There have been plenty of attempts to find and develop new non-volatile memory technologies, yet of all the concepts, PCM provides the most compelling solution – and Intel and STMicroelectronics are delivering PCM into the hands of customers today. This is an important milestone for the industry and for our companies."

According to the Web-Feet Research the combined memory market for DRAM, flash, and other memory products such as EEPROM in 2007 was US$61 billion. ...Intel profile, ...STMicroelectronics profile

Editor's comments:- Intel is hedging its bets with non volatile memory technologies which could be used in the SSD market. As well as this effort with PCM and a high speed flash venture with Micron, Intel is also an investor in Nanochip. The holy grail for nv memory is to get the speed of RAM with the long term data retention and low pricing of flash. There are many contenders in this market but most will probably fail.

Past reasons for new semiconductor storage technologies failing to get established have been unreliability (early data loss in GI EAROMs which didn't show up in early prototypes) and lack of scalability (in Intel bubble memory). Other reasons for new storage technologies failing to reach potential is that the main competitor does better than planned - for example hard disk capacity kept increasing faster than the optical disk industry had hoped.

CAMPBELL, Calif - February 6, 2008 - ONStor Inc. today announced that the company ended its 3rd consecutive year of 100% revenue growth. Designed with n-way clustering, file server virtualisation, and a single pool of open storage, ONStor says its clustered NAS products deliver simple, efficient NAS storage management solutions which are also energy efficient. ...ONStor profile

COSTA MESA, Calif - February 6, 2008 - Emulex Corp today announced availability of its 8Gb/s Fibre Channel host bus adapters. Designed to maintain backward compatibility with existing 4Gb/s and 2Gb/s products, Emulex PCI Express 2.0-based 8Gb/s HBAs enable a seamless transition to next-generation SANs. ...Emulex profile

Editor's comments:- my first reaction to this was - hadn't I already run a similar story about QLogic sampling 8Gbps HBAs last August? Turns out I had. That's why Emulex's white paper Fact vs. Fiction - What QLogic doesn't want you to know (pdf) is also getting a link here.

Editor:- February 6, 2008, 2008 - STORAGEsearch.com today updated its monthly list of the top subjects viewed by storage searchers in January. The top 5 subjects were:-

(1) - Disk to disk backup - up 1 place
(2) - Hard drives - down 1 place
(3) - Solid state disks - no change
(4) - 2.5 inch SSDs - no change
(5) - RAID systems - up 3 places

Overall pageviews grew 17% compared to the year ago period.

The last time RAID systems were in the top 5 subjects was in January 2001, when it came 3rd after SAN switches (at #2), and Backup Software (#1). Our readership is now more than 3x larger and pageviews more than 5x larger than back in those innocent days before 9/11. ...click to see top 20

LegalTech, New York - February 5, 2008 - Mimosa Systems and Index Engines today announced a joint partnership. Together Mimosa and Index Engines address the many challenges of eDiscovery by enabling organizations to implement a powerful, litigation-ready, eDiscovery solution to rapidly, discover and retrieve time-sensitive data stored in email and offline tape repositories.

"The December 2006 amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure for Electronic Discovery ushered in the use of email archiving for legal document retention and preservation," said Vivian Tero, Senior Research Analyst, IDC. "The eDiscovery rule changes eliminated the need of emails to pass the hearsay test; hence, more companies are deploying email archiving applications to manage critical email as business records and to address future discovery burdens, as opposed to just meeting mailbox management and storage optimization needs."

Courts are getting tougher on companies that fail to provide documents, especially email. One of the main problems stemming from compliance and electronic discovery mandates is companies' failure to find documents and email because they've been deleted. However, the deletion of documents is often not a reasonable defense when a company is faced with a discovery request. ...Index Engines profile, ...Mimosa Systems profile

SANTA CLARA, Calif - February 1, 2008 - Intel Corp and Micron Technology Inc. today unveiled a jointly developed new NAND flash technology that is 5x faster than before. It can sustain speeds up to 200MB/s for reads and 100MB/s for writes.

"The computing market is embracing NAND-based solutions to accelerate system performance through the use of caching and solid-state drives" said Pete Hazen, director of marketing, Intel NAND Group. "At up to 5 times the performance over conventional NAND, the high speed NAND from Intel and Micron, based on the ONFi 2.0 industry standard, will enable new embedded solutions and removable solutions that take advantage of high–performance system interfaces, including PCIe and upcoming standards such as USB 3.0." ...Intel profile, ...Micron profile

Editor's comments:- although you can already buy flash SSDs from STEC which deliver the same R/W throughput that Intel and Micron are claiming is the "fastest" flash throughput - it's a mistake to confuse chip performance with system performance.

A flash SSD is a complex sub-system which can deliver many times the intrinsic flash memory speed through its host interface using parallel architecture. What Intel and Micron are saying here is that you can soon expect a new generation of faster dumb flash storage using their new technology. It follows that SSD products which amplify raw flash chip performance will get faster (and cheaper) too.

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