Fusion-io
Secures $47.5 million Series B Funding
Editor:- April 7, 2009 -
Fusion-io announced it has
closed $47.5 million in Series B funding and
named a new CEO,
David Bradford.
Bradford brings 30 years of experience to Fusion-io, including 15
years at Novell where
he helped lead the company from startup status through a series of acquisitions,
public offerings and global business development activities to its position as a
multi-billion dollar corporation. During his last 3 years at Novell, he reported
directly to the CEO, Eric Schmidt.
"I am delighted to hear that David Bradford has been appointed
CEO of Fusion-io," said Dr. Schmidt, now the CEO of
Google. "I have
great confidence in his ability to lead this innovative company."
"In just over a year, this company has demonstrated through its
ground-breaking product offerings that it has the potential to change the way
enterprise organizations think about storage," said
Scott
Sandell, general partner at NEA (one of
Fusion-io's early investors). "This round of funding will enable Fusion-io
to build on that momentum and help the company keep pace with the growth demands
of the marketplace, while permitting them to continue leading the evolution of
network storage."
Samsung Pays Spansion $70 million
Editor:- April 7,
2009 - Samsung
Electronics will pay Spansion $70 million
as part of a flash memory
patent settlement
announced
today.
The companies have also exchanged rights in their patent
portfolios in the form of licenses and covenants subject to a confidential
settlement agreement.
ExaGrid Revenue Grows 120%
Editor:- April 7, 2009 -
ExaGrid
announced
today
that revenue in Q109 was up 120% compared to the same quarter last
year.
If you're not familiar with the company - you might think from
the numbers - it's another SSD vendor.
But you'd be wrong.
ExaGrid
makes old fashioned rotating disk-based
backup systems adorned with stylish trendy
data deduplication.
One thing it does have in common with SSDs, however, is it's
green. Its
compression and dedupe technologies reduces the disk space required for
backup by upto 50
to 1. ExaGrid has published
100
customer quotes to persuade dedupe skeptics. I haven't actually counted
them But it looks like a lot.
OCZ Pitches 2.5" SSDs at Mac Users
Editor:-
April 7, 2009 -
OCZ Technology Group
today unveiled new
2.5"
SATA flash SSDs for MacBooks.
OCZ has also published
a
list of MacBooks which the company says are compatible.
new home page for - SSD SoCs
Editor:- April 7, 2009 -
StorageSearch.com today
launched a new directory of merchant market
SSD SoC vendors.
What's
a "merchant market SSD SoC vendor?"
In this context - it's a
chip company which sells
SSD controller (System on a Chip) technology on the open market.
Traditionally
in the SSD market - oems designed their own proprietary controllers to manage
the RAM or
flash media in their SSD
products. That was partly due to necessity - because the market was small and
there were no established standards. And also to protect the many
secret ways they
dealt with reliability
and performance
issues.
In recent years, however, as the
size of the
SSD market opportunity has become clearer, the supply of IP related to
designing flash SSDs
has, itself, become an attractive market.
In datamining our online
content I discovered that the number of companies which market SSD SoCs,
already listed on these pages, has nearly reached double digits. And - for
growing markets - that's always been the trigger point to create a new
directory. It will make them easier to find, defragment related news and
provide a home page for articles.
Product marketers who are in such
companies, and who are not already listed, should contact me
by email - with the subject line "SSD
SoCs".
Intel EOLs PATA SSD DOM
Editor:- April 6, 2009 - a
report on TGDaily.com
says that Intel
is EOLing its
Z-P230
SSD module which was aimed at the netbook market.
If you look at the
1.0" SSDs directory
here on StorageSearch.com you'll
see that 25 companies now make SSD chips, DOMs or modules designed to
fit into very small footprints. |
|
| LSI
Acquires 3ware RAID Adapter Line........................................ |
Editor:- April 6,
2009 - LSI
today
announced
that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire the assets and certain
associated intellectual property of the 3ware
RAID adapter business
of AMCC for
approximately $20 million in cash.
Editor's comments:- There are
nearly 500 storage
acquisitions and mergers listed on StorageSearch.com.
Here are some others, previously acquired by LSI.
- Agere Systems (merger) - storage controllers / adapters
- AMI's RAID business
- Infineon's HDD Chip Business
- IntraServer Technology - SCSI & Ethernet HBAs
- Mylex - RAID adapters
- SiliconStor - SATA chips
- StoreAge - SAN systems
HP and Fusion-io Demonstrate Scalabity of PCIe SSD Accelerated
ProLiant Server
Editor:- April 6, 2009 - Fusion-io announced
today that its SSD technology has enabled HP to achieve 1
million IOPS (using 2KB random 70/30 read/write mix) and 8GB/s sustained
throughput from a single ProLiant server.
Working together in HP's
ProLiant engineering labs in Houston, technologists from HP and Fusion-io built
a system using 5x 320MB ioDrive Duos and 6x 160MB ioDrives in a single HP
ProLiant DL785 G5 server, running with 4 Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors.
"These
results show the true power of combining our PCI Express and NAND flash
technology with HP's ProLiant architecture," said David Flynn, CTO of
Fusion-io.
Editor's comments:- Fusion-io's SSDs were the
secret ingredient in an
IBM
"million IOPS" story last summer.
The point of this kind
of story is not the performance number, or the throughput, but to show the scalability
of the solution.
End-users like scalable speedups - because they
know that no matter how well an accelerator solves their problem today - if the
application is successful - the growth in demand for it will mean they'll need
yet another speedup 3 to 6 months later.
I used the term "scalability"
instead of "glass ceiling" - because you can't assume you'd get this
performance from all other brands of MLC PCIe SSD cards. (Even when the SSD
oems of such cards have actually built as many as 11 prototypes!) That's
because:-
1 - the backplane would melt - due to excessive power
consumption, and / or
2 - some products incur a lot of host overhead
- which gives good results for a single card - but suffer a drop off in
incremental performance when more cards are added
See also:-
million
IOPS - editor mentions on StorageSearch.com
FalconStor Announces Faster Backup
Editor:- April 6,
2009 - FalconStor
today announced a
VTL Backup
Accelerator option (list price $20,000).
The company says that by
offloading backups - they can be done from 4x to 8x faster than host-based
backups. See also:- Disk
to disk backup / virtual tape
April Storage Events
Editor:- April 6, 2009 - the
main Storage Events
this month are:-
Many vendors have already
pre-announced details of new papers or products
this
week at SNW. If anything really newsworthy does appear I'll let you know on
this page.
New Venyu Announced for Online Backup
Editor:- April
6, 2009 -
Venyu
is the new name for
AmeriVault.
It follows AmeriVault's recent merger with NTG.
How Good SSD Controllers Manage Flash Data Integrity
Editor:-
April 3, 2009 -
SNIA has published
a new white paper -
"NAND
Flash Solid State Storage for the Enterprise - an in-depth Look at Reliability."
(pdf)
It's co-authored by:- Jonathan Thatcher
Fusion-io, Tom
Coughlin Coughlin
Associates, Jim Handy
Objective
Analysis and Neal Ekker
Texas Memory Systems.
The
article contains the best integrated explanation I've seen of the design
trade-offs for error correction schemes and how they affect bit error rates
compared to the raw uncorrected results. It goes on to explain the
importance of the SSD controller and memory architecture (dispersing data
among many chips) and how these can improve data integrity by managing read
disturb errors. It also discusses wear-leveling and write amplification which
have been well covered elsewhere. ...read
the article
SSD Reliability
papers
adaptive
R/W & DSP ECC for SSDs
Data Integrity
Challenges in flash SSD Design
SSD Bookmarks from Solid Access Technologies
Editor:-
April 2, 2009 - Solid
Access Technologies' President, Tomas Havrda - shares his SSD
Bookmarks today on the home page of
StorageSearch.com.
This
is a company whose revenue grew 400% in 2008 and whose customers
include Samsung Securities. So you may be surprised what Tomas Havrda has to
say on the subject of flash SSDs for enterprise acceleration. He's not convinced
it's a good idea.
How 3D Memory Stacks Up - New Market Report
Editor:-
April 1, 2009 - Forward Insights
has released a new 70+ page report (price $5,499) called -
How 3D Memory Stacks
Up.
3D memory technologies offer the promise of continued increases
in storage capacities and lower cost per bit necessary to enable emerging
applications such as solid
state drives. Among the candidates: stacked NAND technologies employing
charge trapping technology, vertical memory cells etched in a pillar and
stackable cross-point memory arrays. This report explores the feasibility of
each of these alternatives as a candidate to replace NAND
flash memories within the
next 4 years.
New Edition of - the Top 10 SSD OEMs - Signals Market Shift
Editor:- April 1, 2009 -
StorageSearch.com today published a new edition of - the Top 10 SSD
OEMs.
In the past 8 quarters this popular feature has tracked the
storage searches of more than 2 million SSD readers.
"Search
volume based rankings of vendors in fast growing markets has proved to be an
important predictor of future market behavior" said editor, Zsolt Kerekes
who has been publishing enterprise IT directories online since 1996. "That's
because the biggest enterprise buyers research new suppliers and technologies
up to several quarters in advance of purchasing new systems. Interpreting
the shifting signals from such a large and strategic focus group can provide
valuable insights into what will happen in the market a year or more ahead."
There's something significantly different about the new #1
company. ...read
the article
SSD Guide Pageviews Grow 74%
Editor:- April 1, 2009 -
StorageSearch.com today updated its monthly list of the top articles and
subjects viewed by storage searchers in March.
16 out of the
top 20 articles viewed were related to the topic of the
SSD market.
Pageviews
of the #1 article - the
SSD Buyers Guide
increased 74% in March 2009 compared to the year ago period.
Pageviews
of the top 5 SSD articles in March 2009 grew 51% year on year. ...see the list |
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