Editor:- April 13,
2009 - SandForce
today emerged
from stealth mode and unveiled its
SF-1000 family of SSD
Processors - aimed at oems building SATA flash SSDs.
Its 2.5" SSD
reference design kit is the fastest 2.5" SATA flash SSD on the market -
with 250MB/s symmetric R/W throughput and 30,000 R/W IOPS.
Leading OEMs
are expected to release both SLC and MLC flash-based SSDs using SandForce
single-chip SSD Processors later this year
"With a deep
understanding of both system- and silicon-level issues, we've integrated the
right balance of reliability, performance, power, cost, and time-to-market in
our SSD Processors while supporting multiple flash vendors' technology,"
said Alex Naqvi, President and CEO of SandForce. "Our products combine key
processing elements with hardware automation to efficiently address the
traditional shortcomings of flash memory. This allows OEMs to provide
enterprise-class SSDs to the mass-market using both SLC and lower-cost MLC flash
devices while delivering peak read and write performance throughout the drive's
lifecycle."
Editor's comments:- I asked SandForce's President & CEO,
Alex Naqvi, for more details about the various package of technologies which
are bundled in the company's "DuraClass Technology" - which achieves
impressively high IOPS without relying on over-provisioning or large external
RAM caches. In particular I wondered what part, if any its choice of processor
SoC (from Tensilica) had to play.
Alex
Naqvi explained - DuraClass performance doesn't come from the choice of
processor - but in the way that they have integrated various design techniques
with very fast hardware (proprietary chips) which the company has designed to
accelerate the core bottleneck functions of a flash SSD controller.
In
concert with other techniques, such as the ability to reorder data before it
is written to flash (thereby attenuating write endurance by 2 orders of
magnitude), RAID like internal protection and very fast garbage collection
SandForce's DuraClass Technology results in small form factor enterprise class
flash SSDs which have no daily write limits for MLC flash and symmetric R/W
IOPS.
C-Drive Registrations Up 30%
Editor:- April 13, 2009
- Compellent
this week announced that registration for its annual channel partner and
customer conference - C-Drive
2009 - is up 30% over the same time last year.
"While
other
industry conferences are
being cancelled or scaled back, C-Drive 2009 is growing rapidly, because we
offer our channel partners and customers valuable training sessions, demos and
educational sessions in an open environment, making our event truly unique,"
explained Phil Soran, president and CEO, Compellent. "We're relentlessly
striving to provide the most efficient storage available, and are excited to
share the latest advancements and Compellent's outlook on the future of storage
at this year's event."
Among other things attendees at the event next month - in
Bloomington, MN - will get a preview of Compellent's enterprise SSDs.
Editor's comments:- I only mentioned this one because I
thought "C-Drive" was a
clever sounding name
for a storage event.
SAN Solutions will Unveil Media Verification Engine at NAB
Editor:-
April 13, 2009 - SAN
Solutions announced that it will showcase the company's new Crawler
media verification engine next week at The
NAB Show.
In scanning file systems and indexing and verifying
media across a SAN or
NAS based architecture, the
Crawler confirms the ongoing utility and value of stored media, and also enables
the content owner to federate storage archives and use a central database to
search all of its media assets.
Seagate's SSD Apologia?
Editor:- April 8, 2009 - Seagate has
effectively published an apology for not being in the enterprise
SSD market - in an article
published yesterday on TechCrunchIT
called -
Solid-State
Drives in the Enterprise: Raising Standards.
It's a nicely written
article by Alvin Cox, a senior staff engineer at Seagate. The plausible
sounding line he argues is that Seagate has been taking a cautious stance re
SSDs, waiting for standards,
not being fooled by hype about
performance claims
etc.
In an article published over a year ago I analyzed
Why Seagate
will Fail the SSD Challenge. Seagate's problems are marketing, business
and management related - not technical. I'm sure they employ many world-class
engineers. But they will still fail. You can see the analysis and what-ifs in my
article.
SSDs have been used in the
enterprise
for decades. As the
price
curves for memory have dropped - many new opportunities have been
incrementally created within the SSD market. Over 110 companies now make and
market SSDs. That will more than double in the next year helped by the easy
availability of SSD SoCs.
Seagate will eventually be among them. Seagate's commentaries on SSDs sound
remarkably similar to Sun
Microsystems' public
agonies
with Linux and the
x86 server OS
market. First denial, then more denial, then explanations of why customers
wouldn't buy such products and then too little cautious action too late - when
no one really cared any more. And you can see where
they are
now.
See also:-
can you
trust SSD market data? |
