Rivals Race to
Unplug Sun's Storage Base
Editor:- July 31, 2009 - an article
in
Infoworld
says Sun Microsystems' customers are being targeted by IBM and
HP who are preying on customers' doubts about Sun's long term
hardware strategies under Oracle's ownership.
Author
Jon Brodkin writes
- "Sun customers were already showing a willingness to switch" - even
before these targeted
Sun-away
campaigns. ...read
the article, SPARC Product
Directory
Introducing - Fat, Regular, Skinny SSDs
Editor:-
July 28, 2009 - StorageSearch.com
today proposed new terms to describe -
RAM Cache Ratios
in flash SSDs.
It is hoped that the new classification jargon
will be useful to users who have to evaluate lots of products, and useful to
vendors as a shorthand when communicating about different segments
within their flash SSD product lines. ...read the article
WD Remains Profitable
Editor:- July 28, 2009 - Western Digital said
its annual revenue declined 7% in the year ending July 3 to
$7.5
billion compared to the previous year.
Net income was $470 million.
"In a challenging time for
the worldwide economy and the
hard drive industry, WD
maintained profitability and stayed cash flow positive throughout the fiscal
year," said John Coyne, president and chief executive officer. "Our
fiscal 2009 and June quarter results demonstrate customers' ongoing preference
for WD products based on their exceptional quality, reliability and
availability, as well as the continued effectiveness of the WD business model
and the passion, nimbleness and capabilities of the WD team."
Editor's
comments:- analysts
and commentators will naturally
compare
these results to those announced last week by
Seagate.
In
my view WD's better comparative business performance is partly due to the
successful outcome (due to a combination of good judgment and luck) of long
term strategic decisions during the past several years about which segments of
the hard disk market to engage in and which parts not to.
With the
benefits of hindsight WD has demonstrated that competitive market analysis and
modeling are as important as the technical ability to fill online catalogs with
products. Anticipating what people want is what counts. But that's easier said
than done. Because the strategic plans and investments have to be made
sometimes years before customers can articulate their own needs.
Micron Solidifies PCIe SSD Plans
Editor:- July 27,
2009 - IDT
announced
it was working with Micron
to develop a commercial PCIe
flash SSD for the server market.
Micron had previously tested
market reaction by unveiling a prototype PCIe SSD (with 800MB/s R/W speeds) in
November 2008.
CWC's New VPX SSD
Editor:- July 27, 2009 - Curtiss-Wright
launched the VPX3-FSM
a rugged 256GB encrypted SLC flash SSD in a 3U
VPX form factor
module.
Aimed at integrators in the aerospace and
defense markets, the
conduction-cooled SSD can be configured to appear to the host as 4 separate
64GB SATA drives or
as a single drive with hardware RAID0 support. It's rated at 160MB/s memory
R/W when configured as RAID0, and 75MB/s per port in a
JBOD configuration.
WD's 2.5" TB USB HDD
Editor:- July 27, 2009 -Western Digital is
shipping a new 3 platter, 2.5" terabyte
mobile hard drive.
The
WD Scorpio
Blue is 12.5 mm high, has a
USB interface and costs
$249.99
TPC-H with Fusion-io SSDs in Dell Results
Editor:-
July 27, 2009 - Fusion-io
today announced today the results of TPC-H benchmark tests sponsored by, and
running on, Dell servers, and audited by
Performance Metrics, Inc.
The
tested system
achieved
28,772 QphH (Query-per-Hour Performance Metric) on a 100GB database, at a
cost of $1.47 per database transaction. (The typical 3 year cost of ownership
for the whole system including software is quoted as $41,998.)
These
results (which Fusion-io says are comparable to a 160 hard disk drive based
system) were accomplished using a single
Dell
PowerEdge T610 server equipped with 4x
Fusion-io 80GB
ioDrives, and 8 hard drives, running Microsoft Windows Server 2008
Enterprise Edition x64 and Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Enterprise Edition x64.
"At a cost-per-transaction, inclusive of the server, software
licensing and storage, the Fusion-io solution, which used solid-state
technologies, reduced the cost of database transactions by almost half,"
said David Flynn, CTO, Fusion-io.
Paul Prince, CTO, Dell Enterprise
Product Group said "In the past, high-performance SSDs were simply too
cost-prohibitive to be taken seriously and these results (using off-the-shelf
products) confirmed that such configurations are a very real consideration for
many applications in enterprise IT solutions."
Report Senses New Ways to Tap MLC
Editor:- July 24,
2009 - Forward
Insights has published a market report -
Key NAND Flash Memory
Design IP (price is $9,999).
Technical innovations in NAND flash
memory design are key enablers of
MLC flash memories,
especially 3 and 4 bit-per-cell technologies.
The report identifies
important intellectual property related to sensing architectures, source voltage
noise compensation, programming algorithms, disturbs reduction, temperature
compensation, high voltage switch, coding schemes and error correction codes
from Hynix, Micron, Samsung, SanDisk, STMicroelectronics and Toshiba.
The author, Luca
Crippa is an MLC flash memory designer with more than 10 years of experience
and is the author/co-author of 20 U.S. patents. SSD analysts ,
SSD IP,
XLC Disk (spoof)
Overland's New Marketing VP
Editor:- July 22, 2009 -
Overland Storage
today announced the
appointment
of Jillian Mansolf as VP of worldwide sales and marketing.
Previously,
Mansolf served as senior VP of sales and marketing at
Data Robotics.
Prior to that, she held various executive positions at
Motion
Computing, Maxtor
and Dell. At
Snap Appliance, Mansolf
played a pivotal role in doubling sales and establishing the company as the
worldwide NAS volume market
leader.
Storage People,
Disk backup |
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| SSD Pricing -
where does all the money go? |
SSDs are among the most
expensive computer hardware products you will ever buy.
Understanding
the factors which determine SSD costs is often a confusing and irritating
process... |
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...not made any easier when
market prices for identical capacity SSDs can vary more than 100x to 1!
Why is that? ...read
the article | | | |
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the fastest SSDs
Speed
isn't everything, and
it comes at a price......... |
But if
you do need the speediest
SSD then wading through the web sites of over 180 current SSD oems to
shortlist products slows you down.
And the SSD search problem will
get even worse as we head
towards a market
with over 1,000 SSD oems. |
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