| ZoneLoc
Prevents flash SSD Data Walking into the Wrong Hands |
Phoenix, Arizona - February
12, 2009 - White Electronic Designs Corp announced a new technology -
ZoneLoc - which automatically sanitizes a flash SSD to military standards -
when the device is moved outside a specified operating zone - to prevent data
falling into enemy hands.
The boundary can be tied to a fixed
location or made to be portable for mobile applications. ZoneLoc has
configurable features and options, including audible warnings, programmable
response times, wireless remote purging and sensitivity modes. By combining
ZoneLoc with encryption and/or physical protection technology, data protection
is maximized. Because the protected device takes its own action, autonomously,
security is guaranteed. ...White Electronic Designs
profile, Storage
Security, Disk
Sanitizers
...Later:- A few years later when I was
talking to Jack
Bogdanski - Microsemi's Director of New Product Development about some
of their new SSDs - I asked - what happened to the ZoneLoc idea?
He
said that his company WEDC (which was
acquired by
Microsemi) did a lot of testing of the ZoneLoc but he decided not to carry it
forward as a standard product because they found that users in difficult
situations could sometimes get into a situation where a false positive alarm
was activated thereby destroying the data. So the problem wasn't in having a
technology which destroyed data but being able to ensure that users would never
do something which would unintentionally trigger the data purge.
A-DATA's New 2.5" SSD
Editor:- February 12,
2009 -A-DATA
says it will show a new 384GB
2.5" SSD next
month at CeBIT.
If
ultimate 2.5" SSD capacity is your thing -
pureSilicon and
STEC offer bigger.
Scott Cleland - New Director of Marketing at Adaptec
MILPITAS, Calif. - February
11, 2009 - Adaptec, Inc. today announced the appointment of Scott
Cleland as Director of Marketing.
With nearly 25 years of
storage experience Cleland will lead Adaptec's global marketing activities.
Prior to joining Adaptec, Cleland served as the director of worldwide marketing
for AMCC 3ware. And
before that Cleland was director of product marketing and technical marketing
for IBM's Mylex storage
division, and previously held marketing positions at Archive,
Exabyte,
BusLogic,
and Conner
Peripherals.
...Adaptec profile,
RAID controllers,
Storage People
cc: Notebook Hard Disk Team - Please Clear Your Desks
ISSCC,
San Francisco, Calif - February 10, 2009 - SanDisk Corp today
announced that it will begin mass-production of the world's first
4-bits-per-cell (X4) flash memory.
Using 43nm process technology,
this breakthrough enables 64Gb memory in a single die - the highest capacity in
the industry.
...SanDisk profile,
Unveiling XLC Flash SSD
Technology - spoof article on X4 MLC
Editor's comments:- X4
technology will enable SanDisk to offer MLC SSDs which are about 5x cheaper than
SLC (X1) SSDs. Although the X4 memory array offers 8x the capacity of SLC - the
memory controllers to make it work are more complicated.
Consumer SSDs
(by which I mean MLC flash) operate in a "control-alt-delete"
environment - where rock steady data reliability may be part of the dream -
but not the reality.
If there are problems due to the flaky nature of
having so many more charge levels to discriminate in those floating gates - then
so be it. It won't be the biggest cause of glitches or aggravation in a
typical notebook. And consumer hard disks haven't exactly earned themselves a
loving respected role by their reliability either. So when the price of the X4
SSD looks right - the notebook HDD sales teams will have to clear out their
desks.
Will X4 find its way into servers too?
Endurance is
the least of the problems with MLC vs SLC - simply the most publicly known. Add
into the mix greater sensitivity to Read disturb, Erase disturb and worsening
long term Data Retention as a result of increased writes... For more about
this see -
Are MLC SSDs
Ever Safe in Enterprise Apps?
The House Always Wins - with Greener Storage
Palo Alto, Calif. -
February 10, 2009 - Pivot3, Inc today announced that 3 casinos in
Oklahoma have chosen its IP SAN storage for a large-scale video surveillance
expansion project.
By making this switch to
Pivot3's
Serverless Computing the Stringtown, McAlester, and Grant casinos stripped
out approximately 90 Dell
servers from the project. In addition to the
green benefits
of nearly 70kW saved, the casino saved more than $300,000 in lower acquisition
costs, lower surveillance data center build-out costs, and reduced power and
cooling. ...Pivot3
profile, NAS,
surveillance
- editor mentions
Nimbus Offers Drive Agnostic NAS
San Francisco, CA -
February 9, 2009 - Nimbus Data Systems today announced the H-class
RH100 quad port 10GbE unified storage system.
It offers up to 60x
hot-swappable SATA (terabyte HDDs supported), SAS (450GB HDDs), or SSD drives
(7.7TB capacity if populated by supported 128GB SSDs). Drives can be mixed
within the same enclosure. The RH100 includes no-additional-charge snapshot,
cloning, and replication software, built-in
iSCSI SAN and
NAS capabilities. The
RH100 has a 4GB cache and 60Gbps internal bandwidth. Nimbus says it can be up
and running in just 20 minutes. ...Nimbus profile,
rackmount SSDs
Nanometer Storage Announces VP of Engineering
SAN JOSE, Calif. - February 9, 2009 -
Nanometer Storage announced the hiring of Mr. Ove Dunder as its
Senior VP of Engineering and Research.
Mr. Dunder, 60, a mechanical engineer, is a multiple patent holder
and comes to Nanometer Storage having directed the successful development of
technology solutions for other
venture backed
organizations. ...Nanometer
Storage profile, Storage
People
Editor's comments:- this stealth mode company says
they're working on 3.5" form factor storage devices that will offer more
capacity than anything else currently available. They'd better get a move on -
because that's a form factor which is slipping down the
storage charts. |
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| Looking Ahead to the
2009 SSD Market |
| Reviewing the main achievements
and failures in the SSD market in 2008 - this article predicts the shape of
things to come in 2009. It was the #1 most popular article viewed by readers
in December 2008. | |
| . |
| Flashbacks
from
Storage History........................................................ |
|
1 year ago - Feb 2008 -
HD DVD
Retires Early - Toshiba pulled the plug on its HD DVD standard conceding
the
removable optical disk platform war to Blu-ray.
But as I said
many years earlier - web downloads of video content will eventually make
Blu-ray's victory irrelevant
2 years ago - Feb 2007 -
STEC Divests
RAM Business to Focus on SSDs - it seemed like a good move at the time, and
looks even better now, as commodity memory businesses (both RAM and flash) are
struggling to survive.
3 years ago - Feb 2006 -
HP Ousts Fiorina
- (HP effectively sacked its CEO). I commented that HP's marketing was
rubbish - for which she had to take full share of the blame.
...Later:- in March 2008 I read Carly
Fiorina's book - Tough Choices - and became more sympathetic to the problems
she had faced shaking up the neanderthals in HP's caves / tribal business
units.
5 years ago - Feb 2004 -
Cornice
Secures $51 Million in Venture Funding
- that was the start of a doomed effort to create a new
miniature hard disk
company.
...Later:-
Cornice was slammed by
patent suits from the hard disk barons.
But even without those
setbacks - they were barking up the wrong tree. This segment of the hard disk
market was the 1st to surrender to flash.
6 years ago - Feb 2003 -
world's first
terabyte class SSDs announced
Concurrent announcements from
Imperial Technology
and Texas Memory Systems
that you could buy such things (for around $2 million) were of great interest
to a small hard core of our readers who actually went out and bought them.
...Later:-
in January 2009 - pureSilicon
said it's sampling a terabyte flash SSD in
2.5" form factor.
Nevertheless the performance of those 2003 vintage SSDs (2 million IOPS) is
still hard to beat today.
8 years ago - Feb 2001 -
1st Mention ofSerial
ATA /SATA
A whole bunch of new storage interfaces were being
launched at around that time. SATA was the fastest to get adopted, and became
the most successful in the market. | |
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