Corsair Sets
Cool Record for DDR3
Fremont,
CA - July 31, 2008 - Corsair announced today that its Dominator DDR3
memory modules have again shattered the world record for frequency.
The record was set using the Asus ROG Rampage Extreme motherboard (Intel X48
chipset) and Corsair Dominator memory, utilizing Corsair's award-winning DHX
technology. The world record of 2,580MHz was reached at latency settings of
9-9-9-24 using a Corsair Dominator DDR3 memory module.
Corsair
achieved these results as part of ongoing lab experiments on the effect of
temperature on memory performance. The memory speed was achieved with the
entire test platform - including motherboard, CPU, chip set, and memory -
chilled to -20 degrees Celsius. ...Corsair Memory profile,
Record Breaking
Storage, RAM news
Editor's
comments:- the IBM research article
High-end
Server Low Temperature Cooling (pdf) provides a concise historic overview
and practical introduction to the state of the art in accelerating CPU
performance using refrigeration.
Imation Launches Half Terabyte Portable Drive
OAKDALE,
Minn. -July 30, 2008 - Imation Corp. now offers a 500GB 9.5 mm thick
2.5" HDD inside its line of Apollo external hard disk drive.
The USB-powered 500GB
Apollo portable hard drive has a midnight-black brushed surface with chrome
details. At just over a half an inch wide and weighing less than half a pound,
the drive easily fits in the palm of your hand. MSRP is $319.99.
...Imation profile,
Removable Storage
CBL Data Recovery Launches a Different Type of Data Recovery
Service
MARKHAM,
ON / ARMONK, NY - July 29, 2008 - CBL Data Recovery Technologies Inc.
today announced a new service offering which shields computer users from the
expense of data recovery when data loss disaster strikes unexpectedly.
The CBL Data Recovery Service Protection Plan provides 3 years of unlimited
data recovery coverage of a hard drive for $99.99.
"It's not a matter of if data loss will happen; it's simply a
matter of when," said CBL's President and CEO Bill Margeson. "The CBL
DRSPP is a preemptive, affordable alternative to standard data recovery service
fees which can exceed $1,000 when physical damage to a hard drive prevents
access to files. For some computer users, such an unplanned expenditure is not
financially feasible. The CBL Data Recovery Service Protection Plan shields them
from the unexpected expense."
Eligibility? - Any make or model of new and existing internal or
external hard drives are eligible for DRSPP coverage. The hard drive must be
functional at the time of registration and accessible from a computer running a
Windows operating system. The hard drive's serial number is captured during
online registration so when a DRSPP customer incurs data loss, they simply ship
the registered hard drive to CBL. CBL DRSPP coverage extends to data loss
resulting from virtually every cause including user errors, mechanical or
electrical failures, software malfunctions, viruses, and natural disasters.
The CBL Data Recovery Service Protection Plan offers 1 or 3 years of
coverage for $49.99 and $99.99 respectively inclusive of parts, laboratory
time and labor. Shipping and applicable taxes are extra. CBL DRSPP coverage
commences 30 days after payment and registration. ...CBL Data Recovery profile,
Data Recovery,
Storage Services
editor's comments:- the Data Recovery market is a difficult one for
vendors to operate in because no-one wants (or plans) to be a customer in this
segment. It's only when disaster strikes that most customers investigate this
subject.
You could argue that if users thought ahead they would spend
their money on backups. But backups frequently go wrong - or can be affected by
the same common mode failures which render the original data media unreadable
(fire, flood, virus etc).
It will be interesting to see how successful
the new business model is - and (if so) how long it will be before it gets
copied.
NetApp Reports on 10GbE NAS
Sunnyvale,
Calif. - July 29, 2008 - NetApp announced today the accelerated
adoption of 10GbE storage connectivity by its customers.
Since
launching 10GbE in 2006, NetApp has shipped more than 3,000 array ports. In
fact, 54% of this total was delivered in 2008 alone, exemplifying the
technology's growing popularity and NetApp's continued leadership in Ethernet
storage.
...Network Appliance
profile
Editor's comments:- here at storagesearch.com we've
been reporting on
10GbE
technology in storage since 2003 - 3 years before NetApp adopted it.
In the past
decade the typical time taken for new storage interfaces to get widely
adopted from the time they're first announced has been 4 to 7 years. At the
shorter end of the scale was
SATA. In the middle
range SAS, followed
by iSCSI at the tail
end. Meanwhile InfiniBand
never reached the volumes originally predicted. But that could still change in
the future depending on what happens in the
RAM SSD market.
BTW
the reason you don't hear so much in these pages from some big name companies
is that our mission statement is "leading the way to the new
storage frontier" - not "following on behind" - as in other
storage publications.
Hifn & AMCC Collaborate on D2d Platform
LOS GATOS, Calif. - July 28,
2008 - Hifn and AMCC today announced a working alliance to
provide a series of reference designs for storage solutions.
Customers
will be able to take the joint AMCC (PowerPC core) and Hifn reference designs
and deliver wireless base stations, access points,
NAS, virtual tape
libraries, disk- to-disk backup,
and other networking and storage solutions.
...AMCC profile,
...Hifn profile
Sandisk Proposes New Way to Specify Flash SSD Endurance
Editor:- July 28, 2008
- Forward Insights has published a presentation by Sandisk's
Director of Marketing Don Barnetson called - "SSDs the MLC
Challenge".
Based on a presentation given last week at
MemCon - the article
predicts market volumes for flash SSDs, and suggests a new simple way to
specify endurance - Longterm Data Endurance - the total amount of data writes
allowed in the SSD lifespan. ...Forward Insights
profile,
...SanDisk profile
Editor's
comments:- the idea of having a simple way for users to compare overall
flash SSD endurance from different vendors isn't new.
2 years ago, in
May 2006, this publication, storagesearch.com,
contacted all the flash SSD oems in the market (including SanDisk) to ask them
to collaborate on an industry standard way to do this. I called my original
proposal the "SSD Half Life".
Most of the oems I talked to
(in 2006) agreed that it might help to speed up SSD market adoption - but didn't
want their own products to be "devalued" by such a simple measure -
as they had proprietary reliability tweaks built into their controllers which
such a simple standard might not take fully into account. Will the new proposal
from SanDisk fare any better?
The SSD market is more complicated now.
Where do you measure the write cycles? There are now middle-ware products,
like EasyCo's MFT that
reduce the writes seen by the SSD, and we may see some of these functions
starting to appear in RAID
controllers too.
SanDisk
recently
reported that its product revenue was 5% less than a year ago. SanDisk's
SSDs offer mediocre performance compared to the best in the market. Maybe
customers already understand the flash market well enough to recognize a better
suited product when they see it.
WD Reports 48% Annual Revenue Growth
LAKE
FOREST, Calif. - July 24, 2008 - Western Digital Corp today
reported record financial results for its fiscal year ended June 27, 2008.
The company posted 48% annual revenue growth to reach a
total of $8.1 billion. Net income was $867 million. In the 4th quarter 63% of
revenue was derived from non-desktop sources, while 37% came from hard drives
configured into desktop PCs. This compares with a mix in the year-ago quarter of
46% non-desktop sources versus 54% desktop PC revenue.
...Western Digital
profile,
Will
Hard Disks Get Faster?
Editor's comments:- WD's
results demonstrate the seeming paradoxes which I wrote about in
How Solid is
Hard Disk's Future?.
That the hard disk market can grow in revenue
even while it's losing slots to
flash SSDs at both
the low end (in the suicide segment notebook market) and at the high end (in the
15k RPM server market - which mostly dents
Seagate and
Hitachi).
As
I explained to one venture capitalist this week - overall HDD revenue will
continue to grow because of new markets in consumer content storage systems -
at the same time as the viable applications footprint in the IT market
declines.
Within the IT market the fastest growing markets will be
medium performance high capacity drives for
disk to disk backup and
entertainment bulk storage. HDDs no longer have a future at the cutting
edge of high performance server apps.
It's more economic to pack
server RAID with low cost
7,200 or 10,000 RPM drives and then leverage the whole caboodle with some
fast SSDs - than to
stuff the RAID with so called "faster" 15K RPM drives. It's more
complicated for users to engineer these hybrid systems - but the simpler it
gets the more slots that WD gains and Seagate loses.
HP BladeSystems Get iSCSI Accelerators
ALISO
VIEJO, Calif - July 24, 2008 - QLogic Corp. today announced a
performance-enhanced iSCSI mezzanine adapter for HP BladeSystem
servers.
The fully integrated QLogic QMH4062 1GbE dual-port
iSCSI Adapter offers
TCP/IP and iSCSI offload, iSCSI boot from a SAN and IPv6 compliance. It is
pre-certified with a wide range of storage systems in both Microsoft Windows and
Linux environments.
"Customers are looking to simplify their operations and reduce
the cost of their data centers," said Jim Ganthier, director, marketing
strategy, HP BladeSystem. "The single-step iSCSI boot feature of the
QMH4062 allows customers to boot their BladeSystem c-Class servers from a remote
operating system image located on an Ethernet-based storage network, resulting
in lower costs while simplifying the boot process for IT administrators."
...QLogic profile
Editor's
comments:- 6 years ago I wrote an article
the New Goldrush? -
Network Accelerators in which I listed all the companies talking about
TCP/IP accelerator and iSCSI offload cards. A combination of the last recession,
slowness to develop standards and Microsoft's drag on the storage software
market meant that many of those products never got beyond prototypes. The only
company to have consistently ploughed this furrow has been
Alacritech. Good
technology ideas don't die. They resurface when the ecosystem looks more
favorable. I was wrong before about the iSCSI Accelerator Goldrush so, like you,
I'll just wait and see what happens now.
Another Warning about Backup Strategies
Editor:- July
24, 2008 - you can never have too many warnings about the things that can go
wrong with
backup and
data recovery
strategies.
I had a reminder this week on Tuesday when a series of
flaky virus protection updates eventually trashed my pc. I was irritated with
myself that I had wasted over a day rebooting, re-installing, defragging,
de-installing and debugging to no avail. Then sanity prevailed. I said to myself
- I don't care if I can get that machine working again - it's quicker for me to
go into disaster recovery mode.
As I hadn't been affected by the 3 F's
fire, flood or feft (theft? - sorry about that one) - it was easy.
I
got a clean PC with no applications on it, installed my data and apps and was
going again within a few hours. About 5 years ago my strategy was to have a
spare PC with apps already installed on it. But when I went to test it one day
- I found it was dead. Safer by far to plan for the worst case scenario.
An
article published yesterday on
USNews.com,
written by David LaGesse - called "Online Storage Site Fails Amid
Lost Files " reminds readers that backup strategies can fail, and you
need redundancy.
This point has been made many times in these pages -
if you haven't
encountered an unrecoverable error in your backup system then you probably
aren't doing enough backups..
Building Solaris / Linux Servers in Hours not Days
Cork Ireland - July 24, 2008 - Tapasol Ltd
is looking for resellers / integrators / partners for its new bare metal server
restore technology.
Tapasol supports the Solaris OS (on both SPARC &
X86/64 architectures) and Redhat Enterprise Linux . Tapasol say that their
technology reduces installation time by upto 85% and this can be done
from a single piece of media or from another server, without needing skilled
engineers. For more info contact Managing Director,
Dan Hayes (dan.hayes@tapasol.com)
...Tapasol profile,
SPARC VARs,
SPARC Product Directory
TCP/IP Acceleration and VTL Leaders Collaborate on Faster Offsite
Backup
MINNEAPOLIS,
MN - July 22, 2008 - NetEx today announced that its HyperIP bandwidth
optimization appliance has been certified by FalconStor Software, Inc.
providing mutual customers with a proven application acceleration solution.
The certification follows joint performance testing by NetEx and
FalconStor to prove interoperability of HyperIP in accelerating data rate
performance across TCP/IP transports for FalconStor data protection solutions,
including the FalconStor VTL, DiskSafe, and FileSafe solutions.
...FalconStor
Software profile, ...NetEx
profile, iSCSI
Editor's
comments:- FalconStor's software is built into
disk backup appliances sold
by many oems. So it's good news for customers of those products who can soon
expect to be offered a simple way to incrementally speed up their
offsite backup.
Texas Memory Systems Launches Fastest RAM SSD
Houston, Texas -
July 22, 2008 - Texas Memory Systems today launched the world's
fastest SSD - the RamSan-440,
The
RamSan-440 is a 4U
rackmount fibre-channel
connected RAM SSD with upto 512GB of storage capacity. It can sustain up to
600,000 random IOPS and over 4GB/second of random read or write bandwidth,
with latency of less than 15 microseconds.
It's the first
RAM SSD to use RAIDed
flash memory
modules for data backup
(instead of
hard disk) and the
first system to incorporate Texas Memory Systems' patented IO2 (Instant-On
Input-Output) technology.
In Active Backup mode, the RamSan-440 continuously backs up data to
the internal flash array without impacting system performance. The RamSan-440
can back up or restore the entire 512GB of data in just 6 minutes. (That's a
process which could take over an hour with HDD backed SSDs of this capacity.)
TMS's patented IO2 technology further improves system availability by making
user or application-requested data instantly accessible after the system is
powered on.
...Texas Memory
Systems profile
Editor's comments:- I spoke to Woody Hutsell
at TMS at some length about the new RamSan-440. The notes below are based on
that interview. I joshed that I might be the only editor he spoke to who
didn't raise that
old question
of HDD versus SSD pricing. But I did ask the price. It's $290k for the 0.5TB
model.
Delivery? - that's where I got a surprise. I've got used to
flash SSD oems preannouncing new products months in advance. Woody said that
TMS has already delivered the new models into customer sites. They decided to
wait for the public launch till they had sufficient inventory to meet demand.
Who
are the customers for the new SSD? - Woody said he expected them to be existing
users of RAM SSDs. They already know the cost benefits of SSD server
acceleration. Traditionally big RAM SSD users have been in the financial and
federal markets - but in recent years that has been expanding into other
markets. And Woody reaffirmed something that I've already heard from other RAM
SSD oems. The greater awareness of SSDs created by the flash SSD market has
increased inquiries for high-end RAM SSDs.
What is the problem the new
SSD addresses? - Woody said it was scalability. Terabyte RAM SSDs have been
available in the market from several vendors for about 5 years. TMS noticed that
a lot of customers just bought the highest capacity model. When TMS looked into
what such customers ideally wanted beyond speed and price - scalability was
cited as a significant issue. Many of these customers have limited rack space -
so the higher density RamSan-440 addresses that. But the unique difference in
the new product is the immediate availability on power up - and 6 minutes to
full performance. TMS already had experience with flash SSD arrays - with their
2TB RamSan-500 launched
about a year ago. That made it easier for them to engineer the new faster backup
and boot in the new product launched today.
As we were talking about
the SSD market - I asked for Woody's insights and views about the confusing
range of products which were now available.
"The SSD market is
multi-dimensional" - he said. Although flash SSD arrays may take business
away from the low end of the RAM SSD market - when they are deployed that could
increase upstream demand for IOPS on storage networks - and increase demand for
RAM SSDs.
One worrying factor - he voiced - is that a lot of new
vendors are offering what they claim are enterprise SSDs based on
less reliable MLC
flash. The focus of SSD customer education for many years was simply -
what's an SSD?
As SSDs get more widely deployed Woody agreed the industry will have to do more
to help customers understand the nuances, risks and benefits which come from
using different types of SSDs. |
