| SanDisk
and Toshiba Confirm Flash Fab Assets Swap |
MILPITAS,
CA - January 29, 2009 - SanDisk announced today that it has signed a
definitive agreement with Toshiba to restructure their flash
manufacturing joint ventures operating at the 300-mm Fab 3 and Fab 4.
As
part of the agreement, more than 20% of the joint ventures'capacity will be
transferred to Toshiba. The restructuring will result in the transfer of
equipment lease obligations from SanDisk to Toshiba and a cash payment to
SanDisk for the transfer of certain equipment currently owned by the joint
ventures. The total value to SanDisk is approximately 80 billion yen, or
approximately $890 million based on current exchange rates. The lease transfers
and cash payment are expected to be completed by the end of the first calendar
quarter of 2009. ...SanDisk
profile, ...Toshiba
profile, merged &
gone away storage companies
Editor's comments:- this simply
confirms earlier public announcements made by both companies
last October.
Idealstor Releases VMware Virtual Center Backup
GAITHERSBURG, MD -
January 29, 2009 - Idealstor today the release of iBac VIP for VMware
Virtual Center (suggested retail price $5,495).
It offers a
single license that backs up every virtual machine regardless of how many
ESX hosts have been
implemented.
"When we entered the VMware backup market we realized that most
backup vendors were ignoring the flexibility and cost savings that were inherent
to virtualization", said Nandan Arora, CTO at Idealstor. "Virtualization
offers a unique set of tools that enables companies to consolidate servers but
also to quickly provision new server instances as needed without having to incur
the costs of implementing a physical server. Most software companies on the
market today ignored this and released VMware backup solutions that are tied to
the number of virtual machines, physical processors or ESX hosts running on the
network.
" iBac VIP for Virtual Center was designed to turn this
licensing model upside down. VIP for Virtual Center lets you backup any number
of virtual machines regardless of the number of processors or ESX hosts being
run. The only limitation is that the backup proxy server will need to be able to
handle the load, but we feel that iBac VIP is affordable enough that if another
proxy server needs to be added to handle the load, we will still be far more
competitive than the existing players in the VMware backup space." ...Idealstor profile,
...Backup Software
New Speed Dating Event aims to help Lonely Storage Vendors
Editor:-
January 28, 2009 - registration was opened today for the Business Development Event taking
place in Boston, MA in June.
The goal is to create a forum for
face to face contact for industry insiders (vendors, VARs, consultants,
analysts, press) that does not require the expense of exhibiting products and
catering to end-users. Registration is $495 per person prior to April 1st.
Press member registration is complimentary. Storage Events
Editor's
comments:- in recessions you hear a lot of enthusiastic
ideas from marketers about what
they can do to develop new business against a backdrop of lower customer demand
and shrunken budgets. When times are good marketers attribute revenue growth to
the cleverness of what they have just done - instead of acknowledging the pull
effect of a rising tide. It's only when the tide goes out they can't tell which
rock they should be standing on.
Are events where people get together
to discuss markets a good idea? That depends on your own particular
circumstances. Personally, for me - electronic communications are far more time
efficient - enabling me to be talking to readers in China or India at one part
of the day, and in the US at the other. And I hate wasting time talking on the
phone - as I can get much more done via email. But I'm at the extreme end of
this spectrum - as my job involves optimizing editorial IOPS. Some well known
and respected PR
agencies and storage
analysts are associated with the new BD
Event so it's worth seeing their website.
Fujitsu Parks Hard Disk Heads Business
Tokyo
- January 27, 2009 - Fujitsu Limited announced today that it will
discontinue its hard disk drive head business (which employs 360 people) as
part of a broader strategic review of the HDD operations.
The HDD head development and manufacturing operations are
currently performed at the Nagano Plant. The company will reassign plant
employees working in the HDD head operations to other operations within the
Fujitsu Group. ...Fujitsu
profile
RAID Inc Launches 1U Rackmount SSD
Methuen, MA - January 27, 2009 -
RAID Inc. announced the availability of its new 1U SSD RAID.
The Razor SSD
is a 12 bay 4 port fibre-channel
system using COTS 2.5"
SAS SSDs in a
RAID protected array. The
Razor comes with RAID's patent pending
StorageWatch service -
which proactively monitors storage conditions in real-time. ...RAID Inc profile,
rackmount SSDs
StorageIO Founder Publishes Book - Green and Virtual Data Center
Stillwater, Minn.- January 27, 2009
- "The Green and Virtual Data Center" - is a new book (376 pages,
MSRP $79.95) by noted author and StorageIO founder Greg Schulz.
The book sets aside the political aspects of what is or is not
considered green
to examine the opportunities for organizations trying to grow their business
while being environmentally friendly in an economically efficient manner.
Addressing multiple technology domains and disciplines, it looks at design and
implementation tradeoffs using various best practices and technologies to
sustain application and business growth while maximizing resources, such as
power, cooling, floor space, storage, server performance, and network capacity.
...StorageIO profile |
|
| 2
Terabyte Hard Drive Breaks Out of the Old RPM Groove |
LAKE
FOREST, Calif. - January 27, 2009 - WD today announced availability of
the world's first 2TB hard drive - a 3.5" SATA model (MSRP $299).
Something
else that's new in an HDD launch - WD doesn't state an RPM rotation speed or
access times in its datasheet.
That's the first clue that the random IOPS performance of this hard
disk could be very slow - making it unsuitable for some types of server
applications. Instead the company refers to IntelliSeek - "which
calculates optimum seek speeds to lower power consumption, noise, and vibration"
(see WD's graphical
demo to get
an intuitive feel of how this works). As all diskmakers know - if you push one
parameter hard - something else has to give. That's why many hard disks for
rugged mobile applications like cars still only spin at 4,200 RPM (not much
faster than disks 20 years ago).
The clever thing about this new drive - the
WD Caviar Green
- is not the technical tweakeries discussed in the press release (about
reducing spindle wobble, and head wear blah, blah). In my view the clever thing
is the marketing thinking behind it.
WD knows that HDDs can never
compete with SSDs when it comes to performance. But, as predicted in my 2007
article How
Solid is Hard Disk's Future? - there are applications where HDDs will
remain competitive. That includes bulk storage low IOPS applications like
disk backup, video
archiving etc - and in that article I said - "HDDs will only survive in
applications where the average size of disk installed is an order of magnitude
above the most commonly available shipped SSD."
As the top end
capacity of high volume consumer flash SSDs today is 128GB to 256GB - a 2 TB
hard drive is about right. As long as the cost per terabyte of the hard drive is
low enough, and as long as the random seek performance beats
tape and
optical storage - it
doesn't really matter how slow the rotation speed is in WD's new 2TB drive.
Anything that requires faster random seeks will be offloaded to another
worker in the storage hive. ...Western Digital profile
NetApp Veteran is New CEO at Broadcast Media Storage Company
SUNNYVALE,
Calif. - January 27, 2009 - Omneon, Inc. announced today that its
board of directors has appointed Suresh Vasudevan as the company's
president and CEO and as a member of the board.
Vasudevan joins
Omneon having most recently served as senior vice president of product
operations at Network
Appliance and as a member of the company's executive team, leading all
product management and engineering for the NetApp product portfolio.
Vasudevan's career at NetApp spanned nearly a decade. Prior to his tenure at
NetApp, Vasudevan worked at the management consulting firm McKinsey & Co. in
New Delhi, Mumbai, and Chicago as a senior engagement manager focusing on
product marketing, operations, and marketing strategy.
...Omneon profile,
Storage People,
NAS
New Directory for SAS SSDs
Editor:- January 26,
2009 - StorageSearch.com
today published a new article and directory on the subject of
SAS SSDs.
This
market has been a long time acoming - and for many years there were only 1 or 2
vendors in the market. The new article chronicles the genesis of
SAS SSDs and lists
known vendors - which will head into double digits this year.
SNIA Publishes Draft Document on Green Storage
London,
UK - January 26, 2009 - SNIA announced today the availability for
public review and comment its initial Green Storage Initiative Green Storage
Power Measurement Specification.
Among others, one proposal is for an Idle Power Measurement
specification reported as raw GB per Watt (GB/W). ...SNIA profile,
Storage ORGs,
Green Storage -
Trends and Predictions
Qimonda Bust
Munich,
Germany - January 23, 2009 - Qimonda AG has petitioned for the
opening of insolvency proceedings due to illiquidity.
To comply
with German law the company has announced the appointment of insolvency
administrators.
...Qimonda profile
Editor's
comments:- Qimonda's revenue in 2008 was 1/2 the level it had been 2 years
earlier, and the outcome (in today's press release) was predicted in an
article I wrote in 2006 - the
names change but the problems remain the same.
Objective Analysis
has published an article about the lead up to Qimonda's insolvency and
explores the possible
fallout
for Qimonda's stakeholders.
Nimbus Unveils New High End NAS
San Francisco, CA -
January 22, 2009 - Nimbus Data Systems today announced the H-class DH200
4 port 10GbE iSCSI NAS.
Starting with a 2U rackmount base unit -
the DH200 is expandable upto 84TB using SATA hard drives or 10TB using flash
SSDs. Its proprietary HALO
storage OS provides data protection and easy to use virtualization.
Nimbus says its cache management (upto 24GB of cache) and support for
hybrid
storage dramatically increases performance at a competitive price point.
...Nimbus Data Systems
profile, rackmount
SSDs
Hard Times for One Time #1 Hard Disk Maker
Editor:-
January 22, 2009 - Seagate
said its revenue had declined 33% year on year in
preliminary
results for the most recent quarter published yesterday.
No one
expected good news from the company which earlier this month terminated it CEO
and announced a 6% reduction in its workforce. Although the credit crunch will
get much of the blame for these results Seagate had been losing market share
during 2008 to other hard
disk makers - even when the overall HDD market was growing in revenue.
The
narrowing revenue gap between Seagate, the world's #1 biggest HDD maker, and the
#2 Western Digital can
be judged from comparing the most recently published financial data or
guidance available for both companies. That shows a mere 20% difference -
instead of the 2 to 1 ratio which pertained 3 years ago.
Hard times
for Seagate doesn't mean that storage is going out of fashion. Every activity
which generates data also results in more storage being used somewhere.
Technologies which reduce the need for raw storage - such as compression and
deduplication -
can play only a limited part on demand for hard disks because they incur
unacceptable performance hits or are restricted by platform. Technologies
change... 10 years ago it seemed like
tape libraries were
masters of the storage universe. We predicted and chronicled the
market shift to disk
backup.
Today - SSDs are replacing HDDs at the bottom end of the
RPM market in notebooks and at the high end of the RPM market in servers.
But the long term transition to solid state storage - which we predicted
6 years ago still has a
way to run. At the end of this recession - there will still be a hard disk
market - but I expect it may only be 1/2 the size (in revenue) that it was in
2008. |
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Megabyte had already mastered
serial SCSI
for
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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. | |
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