Storage news -
2008, September week 3 |
SSD endurance
SSD market
history
Surviving
SSD sudden power loss
Exiting the
Astrological Age of Enterprise SSD Pricing
|
SAMSUNG
Securities Chooses Solid Access Technologies' SSDs to Accelerate AIX Servers
Newburyport,
Mass - September 17, 2008 - Solid Access Technologies today announced a
significant sale of its RAM based SSD accelerators to SAMSUNG Securities
Co., Ltd, a full-service investment bank.
Solid Access
(working with its Korean partner NEOframe Inc.) earned SAMSUNG Securities'
business after an exhaustive 6 month evaluation in competition with other
DRAM-based SSD vendors
and an incumbent Tier 1 RAID
supplier.
For use within SAMSUNG Securities' market data processing
activities, 28x
USSD 200 devices are
being integrated with 28
IBM
POWER6 570 servers running AIX.
With a 10 microsecond access
time, Solid Access provides very fast IOPS and data bandwidth performance to
tackle the demanding tasks of this critical business function, which requires
low latency and high
reliability. Meeting these benchmarks plus a track record of zero field
failures after 2 years of 24x7 customer production usage, the USSD 200 met all
the requirements of SAMSUNG Securities.
"This sale by Solid Access Technologies of a DRAM SSD solution
into the financial space is testimony to the imminent, and significant market
presence that SSD is going to have within users and applications that demand the
highest performing possible storage systems," said Mark Peters, an analyst
at Enterprise Strategy Group.
"This presence will not be measured in terms of capacity, which is how
we've traditionally measured storage devices, but will be in terms of raw
throughput, delivering truly impressive I/O per $$ and per KW."
...Solid Access
Technologies profile
Editor's comments:- you can be pretty sure
that the IT guys in SAMSUNG Securities can easily think of at least one
locally based company which makes
flash SSDs. This
story clearly demonstrates that expert users with demanding applications
understand the critical
differences between
RAM and flash SSDs.
Atempo Announces New Email Archiving Support for Macs
Palo
Alto, Calif - September 17, 2008 -
Atempo, Inc. has introduced a series of enterprise digital archiving
solutions for combined Windows-Mac environments.
Atempo
Digital Archive enables the automated and end-user triggered movement of
data from primary disk onto archival media, saving on storage costs and
protecting digital assets for long-term retention. Atempo Digital Archive for
Messaging for
Microsoft
Entourage offers Mac users utilizing Entourage as their primary email
client the same level of access to the archived messages as traditional Outlook
users. ...Atempo
profile, Backup Software
Samsung Loses Patience with SanDisk Management - Publishes Offer
to Buy Shares
Editor:- September 17, 2008 - Samsung Electronics
today published an
open
letter aimed at shareholders offering to buy SanDisk.
In
this letter you can see that Samsung has been talking to SanDisk about this for
many months - and is frustrated by unrealistic market and pricing expectations
from SanDisk's management.
My own view re SanDisk is that the company
wasted many opportunities it had in the SSD market which would have been enabled
by its acquisition of
M-Systems in 2006.
Having acquired a company with a
track record
of innovation in high speed flash SSDs - SanDisk apparently ignored or
deliberately dropped those server-ready product lines and focused instead on
the suicide "me-too" consumer end of the SSD market. Not surprisingly
as result SanDisk has been losing market share in the SSD market at high double
digit rates.
Here are some comments from other
SSD analysts.
Jim
Handy at Objective
Analysis... "SanDisk is in the midst of negotiations with Samsung to
renew patent licenses under which Samsung is paying SanDisk hundreds of millions
every year. Should Samsung succeed in this acquisition, Samsung will be in a
position to receive a similar royalty stream, and to perhaps grow that stream to
something significantly larger than SanDisk's current royalty revenue.
Something we have not mentioned yet is that SanDisk not only owns a large share
of the intellectual property covering 2-bit MLC, but they appear to be the only
company to own 3-bit and 4-bit IP, and are likely to profit handsomely from this
position over the next two years. What about Toshiba? Ever since SanDisk
converted from NOR to NAND early this decade they have had a very close
relationship with Toshiba. "
SanDisk focused blogger -
Savo Lainen hasn't said anything
as we go to press, but his comments are always interesting.
Gregory
Wong founder of Forward
Insights discussed this rumor
last
week and may have a follow-up.
SanDisk issued its own press release
- effectively saying
No!
to Samsung's offer. And among other things -derided it as - "an
opportunistic attempt to take advantage of SanDisk's current stock
price, which is significantly depressed given industry cyclicality, the
uncertainty resulting from the unresolved patent cross license agreement
renewal with Samsung, and general equity market conditions."
Wasabi Expands iSCSI SAN Product Line
VMWorld,
Las Vegas, NV - September 16, 2008 - Wasabi Systems has expanded its
line of VMX iSCSI SAN appliances.
Targeted applications for the
VMX series include disk-backup,
digital archive, web2.0 infrastructure, video surveillance, digital media
infrastructure and general office systems. The VMX series was designed to
support virtual server infrastructure using VMWare, XEN or Hyper-V server
virtualization technology. The
VMX
2000e starts at under $6,000 for a 2TB system and can be expanded up to
12TB.
"Our initial iSCSI SAN appliances have
been well received in the market place," said Frank G. Logan, Wasabi's
President and CEO. "These new models have been upgraded and cover a much
broader spectrum of the market and outperform many of the market leaders at
dramatically lower price points. With the addition of 10GbE, thin provisioning,
snapshot and volume shadow copy services, we cover the entire market spectrum
from entry level to mid-range enterprise requirements." ...Wasabi Systems profile
Coraid Introduces EtherDrive Storage Priced at $500 / TeraByte
VMWorld, Las Vegas, NV -
September 16, 2008 - Coraid today announced that it will now sell its
popular line of EtherDrive SAN storage appliances with installed "Coraid
certified" disk drives.
As an introductory offer, Coraid is
now selling its popular EtherDrive SR2421 with 24 installed and tested terabyte
enterprise RAID quality
disk drives for a total price of $12,000.
"Coraid certified
disk drives are now available from Coraid installed and tested with EtherDrive
storage appliances. We maintain a continuous test environment to insure Coraid
certified disks are the best disks available - based on
reliability and
performance," said James Kemp, CEO of Coraid. "Now customers can
purchase complete certified storage systems from Coraid that include free
service and support for 3 years, including disk replacement."
Coraid's EtherDrive Storage products use standard Ethernet and the
open AoE storage protocol
which eliminates the complexities and high cost typically associated with
iSCSI or
Fibre Channel systems by
removing the need for expensive TCP/IP off-load Engine cards. Instead, AoE
enables disks to be shared on a network to create scalable storage systems at
a lower price.
...Coraid profile
Editor's
comments:- I was trying to remember how long it's been since Coraid started
talking about their ATA over Ethernet.
The earliest reference
to it here on the mouse site is a news story dated
September 2003. I
thought I'd mention that for conservative readers who don't like to get burned
by becoming involuntary beta sites for new software.
It's all very
well taking risks when risk-taking is in your job description and you have the
technical resources to deal with the backlash. I used to do a lot of that in the
past. Now I'm at the other extreme end of the spectrum.
I clung onto
Windows 98 until January 2007 - and there was nothing wrong with my 7 year old
PC when I retired it. I might look at Vista in another 5 years or so - but email
and designing web pages are lightweight applications - (or should be). My wife
who trains marketers in companies like Microsoft - used to jokingly call me
the "customer from hell" - off the right hand edge of the technology
adoption curve. I was also the only person in the UK who didn't have a
cellphone. When she told this "Laggard" story to product marketers at
a mobile phone company - they asked her to ask me what extra features would
they have to add to a phone to persuade me to buy one. I said an electric
shaver, torch and TV remote. I'm still waiting for those to appear.
One
of the things on my "to-do soon" list is a an SSD directory for
conservative buyers who don't want anything to do with risky new technology
from suppliers who have only been in the market for 5 minutes. It's tentatively
called "SSD-Classico" - and will include vendors who have been in that
market for at least 3 years. There are many technical timebombs built into
new products which newbie oems and their product marketers don't understand.
Longevity is no guarantee of
reliability either.
But the new pages will offer a simplified way to find experienced vendors.
New Tool Helps Reduce Identity Theft
NEW
YORK - September 16, 2008 - Identity Finder, LLC announced the
upcoming release of Identity Finder Enterprise Edition 3.5 and their newest
product, Identity Finder Monitoring Console.
Identity Finder
Enterprise searches computers for Personally Identifiable Information and helps
employees clean the data it uncovers, protecting themselves and their employers
from confidential data loss. One of the biggest challenges to preventing data
leakage is discovering all the places data exists. It can easily become buried
anywhere on a computer such as within a hidden column in a spreadsheet from years
ago.
Todd Feinman, Identity Finder's CEO, says, "Organizations can no
longer rely on simple anti-virus suites to protect information as there are an
ever increasing number of threats that steal personal data -- from viruses,
worms, and Trojans to spyware, botnets, and malicious web application exploits.
Even file sharing programs, voluntarily installed by many individuals, have
become a large source of data loss and full hard disk encryption cannot protect
against sensitive data exposure in these scenarios. Tools such as Identity
Finder are required."
...Identity Finder
profile, Storage
Security
SiliconSystems Announces Faster 2.5" SiliconDrives
ALISO VIEJO, Calif. -
September 16, 2008 - SiliconSystems, Inc. today announced faster,
higher capacity, versions of its new 2.5" SATA and PATA SiliconDrives.
The new SSDs , designated SiliconDrive EP, feature read/write
speeds up to 50MB/s and are shipping now in capacities up to 64 GB. The new
SiliconDrive EP family of SSDs is a potential
hard drive replacement
in a wide range of embedded computing applications that demand industry-leading
reliability for a lower total cost of storage ownership.
"SiliconSystems' new SiliconDrive EP SATA and PATA drives
feature higher speeds and increased capacities to exceed the demands of a broad
range of embedded computing applications," said Robert Fan, VP of marketing
at SiliconSystems. "With these products, SiliconSystems is responding to
rapidly increasing customer demand for higher performance and higher capacity
versions of SiliconSystems' award-winning SiliconDrive products."
The new SiliconDrive EP 2.5-inch SATA and PATA family of products are
excellent drop-in replacements for hard drives in critical storage applications.
The read/write speeds and capacity of SiliconDrive EP SSDs make them ideal
storage solutions for the latest generation of embedded computing applications
such as multiple source video streaming, video surveillance, television
broadcast video routers, and military and aerospace flight data recorders.
...SiliconSystems
profile
Editor's comments:- if you simply look at the headline
performance of the new SiliconDrives your first impression may be - So what?
There are plenty of 2.5"
SSDs which are faster - or offer even higher capacity. These are not the
sexiest drives to design into consumer applications. But speed is just one
dimension of a flash
SSD. Another important one is
reliability -
described as a type #4 application in my
SSD market
adoption model.
Within this industry the differences between
device lifetime and data integrity can vary by an order of magnitude - even
within the set of devices which use wear-leveling and SLC flash. In many
embedded applications trouble free operation over many years - is a more
important consideration than being 30% faster - especially if the SSD is already
fast enough to do the job.
WD's Portable USB HDD Weighs in at 71MB / Ounce
LAKE
FOREST, Calif. - September 15, 2008 - WD today introduced its new
500GB capacity My Passport Portable USB Drives which are designed to make it
easy to store a half a terabyte of music, videos or photos and carry them in the
palm of your hand.
MSRP is $219.99 ...Western Digital profile
O&O Improves Defrag Control Granularity
Berlin, Germany -
September 15, 2008 - O&O Software GmbH says Version 11 of its
Defrag Professional and Server Edition is now available.
For the
first time ever, O&O Defrag 11 lets you defragment individual files and
folders as well as partitions and entire hard disks by simply right-clicking.
The new File Status View is based on the already familiar Block View, which has
itself been improved and extended in the new version. The File Status View
displays the most heavily fragmented files as well as their number and level of
fragmentation.
...O&O profile,
Storage Software ISVs
greenBytes Launches Energy Saving NAS
Editor:-
September 15, 2008 - a new NAS
company called greenBytes
emerged from stealth mode today
with a NAS product line
called Cypress.
Cypress
uses the
ZFS+ filesystem
developed by Sun
Microsystems. greenBytes says that by including native wire speed
deduplication a 46TB "raw" system delivers 90TB of "effective
storage capacity" at a price which is under a dollar per effective
gigabyte. |
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| Is Cucku's Business Plan
Cuckoo? |
San
Francisco, CA - September 18, 2008 - Cucku today announced version
1.20 of its free Social Backup software for Windows.
"Cucku
Social Backup puts a new twist on the age-old chore of
backing up," said
Laura DuBois, storage
software research director at
IDC. "With Cucku,
people enjoy the peace of mind of backing up their data at a remote location,
with the added benefit of knowing exactly where their backup resides, and who is
looking after it. Cucku brings an element of social connection to the backup
process that is difficult to match by traditional hosted backup providers."
Cucku Social Backup relies on a partner approach whereby files are
encrypted and backed up on a friend or family member's computer. Social backup
offers the same peace-of-mind provided by hosted
online backup
solutions, without the cost. The current version is free. A Pro version may be
launched later. ...Cucku
profile
Editor's comments:-
Cucku faqs page answers a lot of
questions such as - What happens if my backup partner's computer has a virus or
spyware infection?
This software is in the same market space as
BuddyBackup from
Databarracks.
Unlike the first generation of free consumer online backup services
which appeared in the
late
1990s (which were mostly supported by invalid web advertising models) you
don't have to worry that your backup will disappear if the original software
supplier does.
The business model behind the new social backup
products seems to be - that if a tiny percentage of users convert to
a paid version with more features - then overall - the customer acquisition
costs are lower than would be the case by advertising only a paid version.
Advertising is expensive. (We know.
We sell it. And so does
Google. ) Advertising is
not sustainably viable for many low value single lifetime purchase products.
Will the new generation of give-away social software products survive?
It's hard to say. Our gone-away
list includes nearly 500 storage companies who thought they had better plans.
Only time will tell if there are enough consumers who care about backup to make
social backup viable. Could be a better long term prospect than most banks
though. | | |
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There
are
hundreds
of SSD articles on StorageSearch.com
Here are some examples.
|
- RAM Cache
Ratios in flash SSDs - it's important to know the underlying RAM cache
architecture - even if you're happy with the R/W and IOPS performance.
- 2010 - 1st Fizz
in the SSD Bubble? - even the dogs in the street know this is going to be a
multibillion dollar market. Greed will play as big a part as technology in
shaping the
SSD year ahead.
- the pros and cons of
using SSD ASAPs - auto tuning SSD appliances are a new category of SSD
which entered the market in the 2nd half of 2009 to accelerate servers without
needing human tune-ups. How can you tell if they are right for you? And how
well do they work?
- the Problem
with Write IOPS - in flash SSDs - long established as a useful performance
modeling metric - this article explains why some specs are exaggerated when
applied to flash SSDs - or predict the wrong results for many common
applications.
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| The simplest way for
vendors to signal to the world that they are masters and commanders of the
enterprise flash array high seas - rather than merely floating barges of chips
which can be swept along in any direction by the latest technology gust of wind
- is to hoist new colors of SSD pricing. |
| Exiting the
Astrological Age of Enterprise SSD Pricing | | | |
