Sichuan,
China - February 6, 2009 - SalvationDATA announced it has developed a
new technology for flash SSD data recovery.
The
company says its methodology will work with all commercial devices (excluding
military and
industrial SSDs
which have inbuilt secure erase). The new tools are expected to launch in May
2009 - and will be priced at about $1,300.
...SalvationDATA
profile
Editor's comments:- I didn't think this would be
feasible - and even wrote an
article explaining
why it would be very difficult.
It is difficult! - and does need a
new approach. But this is one prediction about which I'll be glad to be proved
wrong. Lack of an affordable flash SSD data recovery industry could have
triggered a backfire, damping enthusiasm in the consumer SSD revolution - and
such a setback could have been a reactionary market differentiator favoring
notebook HDDs. (Most consumers and SMBs don't do effective
backups - a trend which
hasn't changed in all the many years I've reported market research on this
subject.)
StorageSwitch Announces 1st XAM App
Boulder, CO
- February 5, 2008 - The first XAM (eXtensible Access Method) compliant
application was released today by
StorageSwitch LLC.
StorageSwitch CEO Clark Hodge said "
XAM storage is the future of fixed content storage and the StorageSwitch
FileSystem Gateway for XAM provides the access."
XAM removes the
traditional proprietary vendor-lock on fixed content storage.
"Fusion-io - in the right place at the right time" -
says new Chief Scientist, Steve Wozniak
Salt Lake City, UT -
February 5, 2009 - Fusion-io announced today that
Steve Wozniak has joined the company as its Chief Scientist.
Wozniak
will act as a key technical advisor to the Fusion-io research and development
group. He will also work closely with the executive team of Fusion-io in
formulating a company strategy that will accelerate the expansion of major
global accounts.
"With the revolutionary technological advances
being made by Fusion-io, the company is in the right place at the right time
with the right technology and ready to direct the history of technology into the
21st century and beyond," said Wozniak. "The technology marketplace
has not seen such capacity for innovation and radical transformation since the
mainframe computer was replaced by the home computer. Fusion-io's technology is
extremely useful to many different applications and almost all of the world's
servers."
Prior to this appointment Wozniak was a member of the company's
advisory board, where he counseled the company on market trends, product road
maps and other strategic activities - which will continue.
...Fusion-io profile,
...Steve Wozniak profile,
Storage People
Careful with that Storage Cocktail Eugene! - compression, dedupe,
encryption
Editor:- February 5, 2009 - earlier this week Storewize issued a
press release suggesting users could get a 200%
improvement in capacity utilization when real-time compression is used together
with dedeuplication.
There are a lot of magic potions being offered to enterprises - and I
was concerned that the type of users who might be looking at these techniques
might also be looking at encryption too. I had recently read an old paper by
Coughlin Associates
which suggested that encrypting data on hard drives could result in capacity
bloat when followed by compression - because the resultant storage needed could
be more than before compression. So I asked Storewize about that.
I
got a helpful reply to my query today from Peter Smails Senior VP Worldwide
Marketing at Storewize - who said "Our technology is based upon real-time
compression so we compress data before it is written to disk. We are also
completely transparent to any downstream operation whether that be encryption,
deduplication, etc. We actually make them both more efficient. You are correct
that due to the exceptionally high entropy of encrypted data it is not
recommended to compress encrypted data."
They would be happy to
discuss with with readers who are interested. It's a complex subject - like many
aspects of the storage market.
A simple way of thinking about it is
mixing cocktails. As I have found from experience - it's possible to take
perfectly good raw ingredients - mix them together and get good (or bad) results
depending on whether you know what you are doing.
As too with
SSDs. If you don't know
what you're doing - they won't accelerate your application at all - but simply
result in more expensive storage. And even if you think you understand the
bottlenecks in your infrastructure - try before you buy is the safest thing to
do. See also:-
video:-
Pink floyd - Careful With That Axe Eugene
Cypress Announces Management Change in Memory Division
SAN
JOSE, Calif. - February 5, 2008 - Cypress Semiconductor Corp. today
announced that Ahmad Chatilla, EVP of the Memory and Imaging Division
will be leaving the company this month to pursue an opportunity as the CEO of a
semiconductor wafer supplier.
He will be replaced by 21-year
Cypress veteran, Dana Nazarian, who is currently the VP of the synchronous SRAM
business unit of MID.
"Ahmad has been a valuable member of the Cypress executive team.
Working with Dana and the rest of the management team in MID, he has created an
extremely profitable and cash-flow-generating enterprise-even in the current
economic environment," commented T.J. Rodgers, CEO of Cypress. "We are
sorry to see Ahmad leave after 15 years with Cypress, but we take pride in what
he has been able to accomplish and we wish him the best in his new career as CEO
of MEMC Electronic Materials, Inc."
Dana Nazarian joined Cypress in 1988 as a new college graduate from
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute with a BSEE and rose steadily throughout the
company in a variety of technical and business roles.
...Cypress
Semiconductor profile, storage
chips
CommVault's CEO "Unhappy" with 19% Year over Year
Revenue Growth
Oceanport,
N.J. - February 4, 2009 - CommVault today announced $60.1 million
revenue for the 3rd quarter ended December 31, 2008 - effectively 19%
year on year revenue growth.
But this was also a decrease of 5% over the prior
quarter.
"We achieved 19% year over year growth in total revenues"
said CommVault's chairman, president and CEO N. Robert Hammer. "This is
not a growth rate we were happy with especially since our underlying business
and pipeline growth is strong. The major issue that negatively impacted our
reported results was big deal slippage. The outlook for our business continues
to be good and we are really excited about the announced introduction of Simpana
8. Specifically, on
January
26, 2009, we announced the launch of our next generation software release,
the CommVault Simpana 8 software suite - which will enable our customers to
reduce costs and improve operating efficiencies. We believe it will enable us to
further strengthen our position in the data and information management market to
sustain our track record of innovation and double digit growth." ...CommVault profile
Editor's
comments:- when I compiled the list of the
Fastest Growing Storage
Companies in 2007-2008 - 34% was the minimum entry requirement and
there were several companies in the 200-300% region. With the effects of the
recession you may doubt if any company this year will reach those dizzy
heights. You would be wrong. I'll be running more stories about those in
upcoming articles and news bulletins. From them we can learn a lot about what
the storage market will look like in the future.
STORAGEsearch.com Reports Top Searches
Editor:- February 4, 2009 -
STORAGEsearch.com today updated its monthly list of the top articles
and subjects viewed by storage searchers in January.
9 out of
the top 10 articles viewed and 8 of the top 10 subjects viewed were related to
the topic of the SSD market.
Pageviews of the #1 article - the
SSD Buyers Guide
increased 32% in January 2009 compared to the year ago period.
Pageviews
of the main PCI Express
SSDs page increased 52% in a single month, making this the 2nd most
popular SSD form factor viewed by readers - after
2.5" SSDs.
For
the top 10 listings see the
market research page.
Coughlin Predicts Dead Hard Drive Bounce
San Jose,
CA - February 4, 2009 -
Hard disk drive
shipments in Q408 declined about 19% from Q308 according to a
quarterly
report ($199 / year) from Coughlin Associates.
Tom Coughlin, principal analyst at Coughlin Associates writes that "there
is more downside than upside ahead and as a consequence, HDD unit shipments in
2009 will experience their worst year over year decline ever. The total decline
in HDD units in 2009 over 2008 will be between 5% and 9% with a decline of 7%
being likely."
Total HDDs shipped in 2009 could be about the same
as in 2007, about 500 million units. The decline in HDD revenue year over year
could be much worse depending upon how well HDD companies can control costs and
inventories.
Long term, Coughlin says digital storage device demand
will recover. Actual storage needs continue to grow and as a consequence, a
lack of growth this year will lead to significant disk drive unit growth when
the economy recovers. It is expected that there will be positive growth in
2010, year over year, and that with a recovery, 2011 could see annual unit
growth much greater than the average, perhaps even 20% or higher (like in 2003).
Editor's comments:-
storage clairvoyants
don't always agree.
Although Coughlin Associates has an impressive
long term track record of being right about predicting trends in the hard disk
market - I already stuck my neck out in commenting on
Seagate's recent
financial results by saying that when the recession ends - maybe in 2012 - I
think the hard disk market will be 1/2 the size in revenue it was in 2008. You
don't have to look far on this web site to see the
reasons why. So
I'm not anticipating much
dead cat bounce
for the hard drive market.
NetApp Starts Walking the SSD Talk
Sunnyvale,
Calif. - February 3, 2009 - NetApp unveiled 2 strands in its solid
state storage acceleration strategy today - support for Texas Memory
Systems' RamSan-500 flash SSD array and also a new Performance
Acceleration Module.
Support for the 100K IOPS
RamSan-500 SSD is
supplied by NetApp's V-Series storage controller and Data ONTAP software. The
RamSan-500 can be utilized as a large, fast networked cache, or otherwise
partitioned to maximize storage efficiency.
Meanwhile - the new
PAM
provides a read cache (16GB to 80GB) implemented by PCI Express DRAM cards.
These enables NetApp customers to significantly increase application
performance in FC disk arrays by 35% using 1/2 the number of hard disks
typically used in over-provisioned HDD arrays. Alternatively customers can
deploy lower cost, higher density SATA HDDs instead of FC disks while still
maintaining performance and making substantial savings in costs. ...Network Appliance
profile, ...Texas
Memory Systems profile
Editor's comments:- better late than
never - NetApp's announcements today make it easier and less risky for their
customers to feel comfortable in following a long established trend to
accelerate network applications performance with SSDs while reducing overall
systems costs
Although NetApp's PAM is a PCIe RAM card and not
a PCIe flash SSD -
it's just a short walk from one to the other. I have little doubt the company
has already been evaluating options in this market space..
New Tool Acts as Bouncer for Up Market Tape Joints
Boulder,
Colo. - February 3, 2009 - Spectra Logic has extended its Media
Lifecycle Management technology outside the library with a new reader - now
shipping.
The MLM Reader (approx $2,500) is a portable device
that allows customers to check tape health on any computer through
USB, without loading the
tape into a library, and
is designed to proactively identify faulty tape media before it is required for
a data restore. It tracks over 30 non-volatile statistics about data tapes,
such as export details; remaining capacity; encryption information; number of
reads and writes; date of last access; born-on date; and cleaning log. ...Spectra Logic profile,
Storage Testers &
Analyzers, storage
reliability
A Hard to Duplicate Offer on Hard Disk Duplicators
Chatsworth, CA - February 3, 2009 -
Aleratec Inc. launches the 1:5 HDD Cruiser - a 5 way hard disk drive
duplicator and 6 way sanitizer for SATA drives combined in a single unit (ERP
$1049).
The base unit is designed for 3.5" drives, but an optional
$105 kit converts it over to 2.5" operation. Duplication speed is
approximately 40MB/s. As an introductory promotion Aleratec is offering a free
3 way PATA disk duplicator to customers who buy the 5 way model this month. ...Aleratec profile,
Disk Duplicators,
Disk Sanitizers
Seagate Pre-Announces 2TB Hard Drive
Editor:-
February 2, 2009 - Seagate
today preannounced its Constellation
hard drive - a 3.5"
2TB SAS model
spinning at 7,200 RPM that will be available in Q3.
This follows hot on
the heels of an announcement a few weeks ago that
WD is actually
shipping 2TB hard drives. Although the WD units are slower - it doesn't make
much difference for most server apps - which will use
SSDs to grease the dataflow
anyway. |
