how long for hard
drives in an SSD world?
exciting new
directions in rackmount SSDs
Adaptive R/W and
DSP ECC in flash SSD IP
Efficiency - making the
same SSD - with less chips
how will Memory
Channel SSDs impact PCIe SSDs? |
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Dolphin's New
StorExpress SSD Ships in May
Editor:- April 21, 2009 - MAGMA and Dolphin jointly
announced
they have collaborated to develop an improved version of the latter's
previously announced
StorExpress
(2U rackmount PCIe
connected SSD product line) which will ship next month.
Capacity
options include 0.5TB (under $20K), 1TB and 2TB. It achieves 270K read and write
IOPs (512 bytes to 4KB blocks) and up to 2.8GB/s of sustained bandwidth. Latency
is less than 50µS. The StorExpress enclosure can be positioned 1,000 feet
away from the host server using fiber.
"PCI Express, with its
tight linkages to microprocessors is the natural technology for creating high
performance systems" said Tim Miller, CEO Dolphin. "By partnering
with Magma we have created an exceptional solution - simple, elegant, cost
effective yet capable of delivering world class performance and flexibility."
Seagate Anticipates Another Flat Quarter for Hard Disks
Editor:-
April 21, 2009 - Seagate
reported
results
for the quarter ended April 3, 2009.
Revenue was exactly in line with
the guidance issued last week. So no surprises there.
But what does
make today's announcement interesting is Seagate's views about short term
prospects for the hard disk
market. Among other things, it says...
"For the June quarter,
in light of the company's view of the current market environment, the company is
planning for the overall demand for disk drives to be relatively flat as
compared to the March quarter." |
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| New
Module Aims at 100 terabytes Enterprise SSD Users |
Editor:- April 21,
2009 - Texas Memory
Systems announced the
RamSan-620 - a 2U
rackmount SLC Flash SSD with 2TB ($88,000 list price) to 5TB capacity and 2
to 8
FC or
InfiniBand ports.
Throughput is 3GB/s. R/W latency is 250µS and 80µS respectively.
Transactional performance is 250,000 random IOPS. Power consumption is 325W.
Multiple RamSan-620s can scale to higher capacities. Upto 100TB can fit in a
single 40U rack.
"The IT community is looking for ways to increase
storage efficiency while boosting productivity," said Greg Schulz, founding
analyst at StorageIO
and author of "The Green and
Virtual Data Center".. "It is time to stop moving around I/O or
other bottlenecks and start enabling storage efficiency via performance
optimised storage that does more work, in a smaller footprint (power, cooling,
floor-space, economic) while boosting productivity. Anyone can attach
flash SSD to a
computer or storage system; however the real trick and business benefit is when
a storage system or applications server can fully utilise the technology without
introduction of, or moving I/O and performance bottlenecks elsewhere. The
RamSan-620 is an example of a new breed of storage solutions that have been
optimised to leverage the capabilities of flash SSD while preserving application
QoS and service level objectives."
Editor's comments:-
there has been a lot of debate in the
fastest lanes of
the SSD accelerator market about whether it's better for users to deploy this
technology inside the server box (as
PCIe cards) - or
outside the box (on the SAN).
This is reminiscent of the old
CISC
vs RISC processor debates of the mid 1980s.
Entertaining as it is
to analyze these polarized approaches I explained in my
2009 - Year of SSD
Market Confusion and
rackmount SSD
articles why I believe that users will, in fact, do both.
Texas Memory
Systems has in the past told me, that whenever they launch a new rackmount SSD
they have some customers who just fill up a complete cabinet with the new model
and use that as their basic unit of solid state storage until the next new
model comes around. They'll only need 6.5kW for the 100TB SSD enabled by
this model - and they'll get the transactional performance of 10,000
hard drives.
See
also:- this way to
the petabyte SSD
Solid State Central is New SSD Disti Down Under
Editor:-
April 21, 2009 - Solidata
announced it has
appointed
Melbourne based Solid State Central
as its new exclusive distributor for the
SSD market in Australia.
Editor's
comments:- SSDs aren't new to the Australian market. In fact one of the
SSD market's pioneers, Platypus
Technology was founded in 1999 in Sydney, Australia.
Spectra Dims Sun's Lights at NASA Ames
Editor:-
April 20, 2009 - Spectra
Logic today
disclosed
that it has ousted Sun
in a big tape library
installation - following a 9 month evaluation.
Spectra recently
installed 2x
T950
tape libraries which together offer approximately 20,000 data storage
slots and up to 32 petabytes of storage capacity, with data compression.
By
replacing multiple, legacy Sun/STK
9310
silos with Spectra Logic technology,
NASA Ames has
freed more than 1,400 square feet of valuable data center floor space.
Editor's comments:- according to Sun's website, its own
suggested replacement for the 9310 is the
SL8500
Modular Library. So I guess that's the product (or the service offering)
which Spectra beat in this case.
WD Ships New 2TB Enterprise Hard Drive
Editor:- April
20, 2009 - Western
Digital - announced details of a new 2TB 3.5"
SATA
hard drive - the
WD RE4-GP.
Features include time-limited error recovery for use in
RAID systems, and lower
power consumption than older hard drives. MSRP is $329.
Editor's
comments:- this kind of drive is optimized to provide high capacity at low
cost, rather than high performance. Typical applications include
disk to disk backup and
video or other massive
content storage.
Oracle Sees Bright Future for Sun
Editor:- April 20,
2009 - Oracle
today announced
an agreement to acquire Sun
Microsystems for approximately $7.4 billion.
Editor's
comments:- this ends nearly a decade of speculation about the future of Sun
Microsystems, a company which created a unique server business peaking at
over $20 billion annual revenue at the turn of the Millenium.
You
can read how Sun created that market, then lost it piece by piece and then
finally lost itself in the storage market in the article which tracks the
22 History of the
SPARC systems market.
WhipTail Announces Channel Partners for its Rackmount SSDs
Editor:-
April 20, 2009 - WhipTail
Technologies today named 5 new channel partners who are selling its
rackmount flash SSDs.
These are:-
ARKAY Systems,
MANAGECAST,
Scale Datacom,
TheAdmins and
XLNsystems.
This follows last
week's announcement
that WhipTail had appointed John Zamites as its channel manager.
OCZ Unveils miniPCI-E Notebook SSDs
Editor:- April
17, 2009 -
OCZ today
unveiled its
1st miniPCI-Express
compatible SSDs.
Aimed
at notebooks
OCZ miniPCI-E options include:- 16GB or 32GB capacity, and 2 interface
options.
- SATA
models - 110MB/s read and 51MB/s write speeds
- PATA
models - 45MB/s read and 35MB/s write speeds
Cache-A Launches Tape Archive for Video Editors
Editor:-
April 17, 2009 -
Cache-A today
announced its 1st product - the Prime-Cache
data tape deck - an LTO-4 compatible
NAS appliance for the
digital film and professional video industry.
"Today's digital
film and video professionals working with file-based workflows need a highly
reliable and cost-effective storage medium for content archiving, interchange
and backup," said Phil Ritti, President and CEO of Cache-A Corp. "We
are delighted to offer these professionals a new line of products specifically
designed to meet their needs while extending the current base of award-winning
A-Series technology into future generations."
Cache-A has licensed Quantum's A-Series technology compatible with
industry-standard LTO data tape drives - the most successful line of
tape drives ever produced
- with more than 2.5 million drives deployed and 100 million cartridges
shipped.
Cache-A says that with a single Prime-Cache system, a user could
manage a 200TB archive for a total cost of less than $20,000 including media -
and with an archive life of 30 years.
Samsung's Misleading SSD Leadership Claim
Editor:-
April 16, 2009 - in a misleading
press release
issued today by Samsung,
the company claimed to be the 1st company to offer
SSDs with
hardware-based
encryption.
"Samsung's new 256GB, 128GB, and 64GB SSDs are the
first solid state drives to incorporate hardware-based encryption..."
A simple
Google
query would have disproved that notion.
Many SSD oems have
recently sampled products with hardware-based encryption - including
Pretec Electronics,
pureSilicon and
SandForce - and long
before that BiTMICRO
started offering real-time full-speed encryption as an option in its 2.5"
SSDs in 2002.
Does
this mean that Samsung's marketers are ignorant about what's going on in the SSD
market? That's unlikely. More likely they thought that such a claim would go
unchallenged in most publications and get
good PR.
...Later:-
in reply to my comments I got this note from Brian Beard, SSD Marketing
Manager, Samsung Semiconductor, Inc.
"It is our understanding that
Samsung is the first to actually begin shipping production-level,
encryption-capable SSDs (which began last month). You might also like to know
that ours is, at this point, the only SSD solution based on the first
industry-wide standard for integrating encryption with storage devices (TCG
Opal)."
EScon Launches Encrypted Desktop Storage
Editor:-
April 16, 2009 - EScon
has launched the Guardian MX-4 range of
eSATA connected
encrypted desktop
storage enclosures for the European market.
EScon's Managing Director,
Tony Howard, says "Backing up data to protect against hardware failure or
accidental deletion is universally accepted as good business practice, however
securing data against theft is less easy to guard against and may not even be
recognised as a threat. The focus is most often on ensuring the physical
security of the building in which the data is housed rather than on securing the
data itself." |
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| this way to the Petabyte
SSD |
In 2016 there will be
just 3 types of
SSD in the datacenter.
One
of them doesn't exist yet - the bulk storage SSD.
It will replace the
last remaining strongholds of
hard drives in the
datacenter due to its unique combination of characteristics, low running costs
and operational advantages. |
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... |
The new model of the
datacenter - how we get from here to there - and the technical problems which
will need to be solved - are just some of the ideas explored in this
visionary article. | | | |
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