IBM Markets PCIe SSD
Technology Sourced from Fusion-io
Editor:- December 9, 2009 - Fusion-io today
announced
that its ioMemory PCIe
SSD technology has been adapted by IBM who will remarket
these solutions (initially with upto 320GB capacity) as its
High
IOPS SSD PCIe Adapters for use in System x servers.
Editor's
comments:- Fusion-io's public association with IBM goes back to August 2008
- when it was revealed as the secret ingredient in
IBM's million IOPS
story.
A-DATA Ships New 2.5" Gamer SSDs
Editor:-
December 9, 2009 -A-DATA
announced volume shipments of its 2.5" XPG range SATA MLC SSDs
optimized for use with Windows 7 TRIM.
Models include:-
SX95
(R/W = 230MB/s and 178MB/s) and
S592
(R/W = 230MB/s and 170MB/s).
Dolphin to Merge with IPTV ISP
Editor:- December 8,
2009 - Dolphin
announced that it
intends
to merge with Best Media AS (an ISP based in Norway - which operates
IPTV, IP telephony, internet and mobile phone services).
See
also:- SSDs in IPTV,
movie creation and tv,
Animal brands in
the SSD market
Seagate's 1st SSD - Finally a Real Product
Editor:-
December 8, 2009 - Seagate
announced details of its
Pulsar SSD
- a 2.5"
SATA
SLC
SSD with 200GB capacity.
Sequential
R/W rate is upto 240MB/s and 220MB/s respectively, R/W IOPS are 30,000 and
25,000 respectively. Aimed at the server market the
BER is quoted as
1 sector per 10E16. Seagate says it has been sampling the new drive - its 1st
SSD - since September 2009.
Editor's comments:- the remarkable
thing about Seagate's 1st SSD is that it took the company so many years to enter
the market. Technically - it's unremarkable.
Will it succeed in the
market? In my view it would be unrealistic to assume that Seagate's long
running dominance in the hard
disk market will translate to dominance in SSDs too - because nearly all
its potential oem customers have already been evaluating or using SSDs from
other sources for
upto 4 years.
And
even if Seagate's new product succeeds in filling holes in design slots in
2010 - its oem customers can always replace this product with their own designs
leveraging the merchant market for
SSD controllers & IP.
To succeed in the SSD market - Seagate will have to demonstrate unique
mastery in some aspect of SSD technology which customers value. The most
attractive area will probably be in the area of
reliability.
In
recent quarters we've seen a spate of
flaky SSDs get to
market. This tendency will rise in 2010 as many storage oems decide that
shipping untried products is a lower risk to their businesses than losing out on
customer mind share. Each bad news story helps companies who have a clean
reputation. But as a newcomer to the SSD market Seagate may have to wait years
to establish its own reputation.
It's tempting to compare Seagate's
entry to the SSD market with
Western Digital. But
the 2 cases are completely different. When WD acquired
SiliconSystems
in March 2009 - it got a business which had started marketing SSDs in August
2004. That gives WD's product marketers 5 years of market experience they can
talk to customers about - compared to 3 months for Seagate. Nevertheless - being
late is better than never.
EMC Casts SSD Divining Rod into Hard Disk Arrays
Editor:-
December 8, 2009 - EMC
today published a report on its new
fully
automated storage tiering concept which the company says will simplify user
operations needed to optimize storage allocation between
hard drives and
SSDs within the company's
arrays.
The company says some of this functionality is
now
available on some models.
Editor's comments:- although
better than nothing - adding a software manager retrospectively to storage
arrays which were never designed for SSDs in the 1st place can never deliver as
much performance as a true native
ASAP
SSD appliance (where some of the support is built into the hardware) - and
nowhere near as much performance as the
fastest SSDs (EMC
has never been in this list) when optimized by human SSD hot shots.
In
order to get the full benefits of the SSD acceleration paradigm EMC will need to
dump its legacy storage array designs and start offering boxes which have been
designed from the outset to support large amounts of
PCIe SSD capacity.
Without that - its systems will remain moderate performers at immoderate
prices.
To put it another way - bolting SSD tiering onto controllers
designed for hard drives is like trying to do air traffic control by having a
traffic cop standing on the ground and waving his stick. You can make the stick
a brighter color and give the pilot stronger glasses - but it's not going to
give you the traffic movements you get from integrated avionics. |
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