Pliant
Announces Another $15 million Funding
Editor:-
March 30, 2009 -
Pliant Technology
today
announced
it has received $15 million in Series C funding.
This will be used as
working capital to support volume production of its
SAS compatible flash
SSDs.
See also:-
acquired SSD
companies, SanDisk,
VCs and SSDs |
|
| WD
Enters the SSD Market |
Editor:- March 30,
2009 -
Western Digital
has entered the SSD market by acquiring SiliconSystems
for $65 million in a cash transaction.
"WD's strong balance sheet,
sales reach, and operations and logistics capabilities will allow us to greatly
accelerate our penetration of our existing markets, while combining our
engineering expertise with WD will enable us to develop new solid-state drives
to broaden our overall product portfolio and address the emerging applications
for solid-state storage in WD's existing customer base," said Michael
Hajeck, a founder and CEO of SiliconSystems, now senior vp and general manager
of WD's Solid-State Storage business unit.
Integration into WD
begins immediately, with SiliconSystems now becoming known as the WD Solid-State
Storage business unit, complementing WD's existing Branded Products, Client
Storage, Consumer Storage and Enterprise Storage business units. WD has
published a FAQs
page about this acquisition.
Editor's comments:- from the
time when SiliconSystems first appeared on our SSD pages in 2004 it was clear
that the company was talking in a different way to the rest of the market. Of
the 4 main market segments which I identified for
SSD market
penetration (published 2005) - I mentioned SiliconSystems as the pioneer in
"High Reliability DAS". Quoting from that article - "The
customer value proposition of the High Reliability DAS SSD is that the interval
between server failures will be extended by several years compared to HDD
technology."
In recent years the company has avoided being sucked
along the alternative currents of the small form factor SSD market and stuck to
its mission of designing SSDs which are sustainable for customers to own - as
reliable
replacements for hard
drives. The company's acquisition by WD demonstrates that those principles
are valued where it counts - in the eyes of the world's fastest growing hard
disk maker.
New PCIe SSD Aims at PC Acceleration Market
Editor:-
March 26, 2009 - Mobile
Mode has unveiled a
PCIe SSD for the
Vista / XP market - the
G-Monster-PCIe
Turbo Speed SSD - expected to ship in June.
Capacity options include:-
256GB, 512GB and 1TB. Both
MLC and SLC options
are available. The flash array includes onboard
RAID protection. R/W
speeds are quoted as 750MB/s and 700MB/s respectively.
Editor's
comments:- Until now -there has been a theoretical gap in the market. Such
products have only supported enterprise OS's such as Linux, Solaris and
Windows Server because, frankly, consumers can't afford them. Financial
traders and analysts might be a potential market for these accelerators - but
I can't see many consumers deciding to forego upgrading their car and upgrading
their PCs instead. See also:-
animal brands in
the SSD market
Hagiwara Unveils CFast Storage Card
Editor:- March
26, 2009 - Hagiwara
Sys-Com has extended its range of
1" SSDs - with
the launch of the
CFast Storage
Card which will ship in Q2.
These industrial grade SSDs are form
factor compatible with CF cards, but have a
SATA interface.
Capacities range from 2GB to 16GB. See also:-
CFast -
Evolution of the CompactFlash Interface (pdf)
New Real-Time Design / Debug Tool for FC / NAS OEMs
Editor:-
March 25, 2009 -
Absolute
Analysis has
announced
enhancements to its range of
serial data test tools
- such as...
- ability to check system behavior in the presence of latency (failure and
recovery) for Fibre Channel and Ethernet protocols, including
FCoE,
AFDX,
iSCSI, IP, IPv6, TCP
- ability to corrupt one or more network events in real-time and simulate
data loss, data corruption, protocol errors and data errors, and check device
under test error recovery procedures.
"Absolute Analysis is proud to offer engineers a much-needed
single solution featuring the integration of sophisticated tools for use in data
communications, telecommunications, and military communications, to capture,
analyze, delay, modify, and verify data at full line rate," stated Dennis
Murphy, President of Absolute Analysis. "This release... enables
in-line, real-time impairment testing coupled with a powerful error injector and
analysis that far exceed existing industry offerings." Storage Testers & Analyzers
Dell Joins iSCSI Compatible SSD Market
Editor:-
March 25, 2009 - Dell
announced
SSD
options for its iSCSI
compatible EqualLogic PS6000 storage arrays.
Pricing starts at
$25,000. This brings the number of
rackmount SSD oems
to 34. That number is expected to reach 300 in 2010.
How Bad is - Choosing the Wrong SSD Supplier?
Editor:-
March 24, 2009 - I've published a article called -
How Bad is - Choosing
the Wrong SSD Supplier?
I've spoken to countless
VCs, oems and
end-users about how difficult it is to know you've got the best
SSD company in your sights
as a potential acquisition
target, supplier or technology partner. If you know what you're doing - it takes
time. And in the past 9 weeks while you've been doing that - another 30 new
companies have entered the SSD market to make things more complicated. It's a
big decision. How big a deal - if you decide later - it was the wrong choice?
Trust me. We live in difficult times. The vampires are coming. If the
pointy stick breaks you
may not get another chance. ...read the article
Compellent Inches Slowly Closer to SAN Acceleration Market
Editor:-
March 23, 2009 - Compellent
today
announced
it would demonstrate its tiered SSD technology at a user event in May 2009.
The physical layer is based on
STEC's ZeusIOPS SSDs.
The soft part - something which Compellent calls -
policy
driven Data Progression apparently " minimizes the number of SSDs
required while providing the highest levels of performance for mission-critical
applications."
Editor's comments:- Compellent has been
slowly drip feeding press releases and blogs about its SSD plans since last
October. Unlike pure
rackmount SSDs
which aim at ultimate performance apps - Compellent's solution looks like it's
pitched at a less ambitious (but maybe larger market) of users who would be
happy with the kind of performance tweak which comes from replacing 2
hard disk slots with 2
flash SSDs. See
also:- Fibre-Channel
SSDs
Samsung Ships Highest Density DDR3
Seoul, Korea -
March 19, 2009 - Samsung
Electronics
announced
today that it has just made the initial shipment of the world's 1st and smallest
high-density memory modules based on 2Gb, 50nm-class
DDR3.
Samsung
is shipping 18 configurations of its new DDR3-based modules, which are
designed for servers. They include a 16GB RIMM and an 8GB RDIMM.
Editor's
comments:- although Samsung's press release talks about how much
RAM you can get in a server
(192GB for a 2-socket CPU server system) the new products will also advance
the density and lower the cost of high end multi-terabyte
RAM SSDs.
IDEMA Names Sun's Flash Guru to Lead SSD Standards
Editor:-
March 18, 2009 - IDEMA
today announced that Michael Cornwell will lead its standards program
for HDDs and
SSDs.
Cornwell, the Lead Technologist for Flash at
Sun Microsystems since
2007, has a long history in storage technologies and collaboration between
manufacturers and customers. He spent 5 years with
Quantum in various
engineering and design roles. In 2002 he moved to
Apple, where he was a
lead storage architect on that company's iPod digital content player. See also:-
Storage ORGs,
Storage People |
|
| MemoRight
Shoots for MIL-STD-810F SSD Market |
Shenzhen, China - March
18, 2009 -
MemoRight says it will ship new industrial grade 2.5" flash
SSDs in May.
The new MemoRight rSSD is designed to operate from -40 to 85
degrees C and the company says its testing processes satisfy
MIL-STD-810F. MemoRight
expects the military,
defense, aviation & astronautics industries to be early adopters and key
users of their new SSD.
The rSSD also features MemoRight's "In-Drive" UPS, which
ensures 100% data integrity at all times. The capacitor simply flushes the cache
upon experiencing any power-off or voltage changes and writes this data to the
flash.
The new rSSD performs at 120MB/s read & 120MB/s write speeds,
with 0.1ms access time. It will be available in 16GB, 32GB, 64GB & 128GB
capacities, with a choice of
SATA II or IDE
interfaces. Like the MemoRight GT Series eSSD, the new model will be
manufactured in a 2.5"
form factor, with an optional
3.5" casing.
...Memoright profile
EMC says - it's Leading the SSD Charge - (is it April 1st
already?)
Editor:- March 18, 2009 - EMC announced today it has
qualified higher capacity
400GB flash
SSDs for use in its storage systems.
Barbara Robidoux, EMC VP,
Storage Marketing, said, "It is clear that Enterprise Flash drives are
revolutionizing the way information is stored and EMC is leading the charge.
We are delivering the 2nd generation of this technology as a result of
significant investments in research and development, testing and integration,
while other vendors struggle to deliver their 1st flash drive offerings at much
lower capacities."
Editor's comments:- EMC's implication that they are "leading
the charge" to place flash SSDs in enterprise servers apps is absurd. To
see which companies did in fact lead the flash SSD charge into servers - take a
stroll down memory lane - and look at
SSD market
history.
And here's another way of looking at EMC's flash SSD
market leadership.
EMC has never appeared in the
the Top 10 SSD
Companies - which has tracked reader search volume on over 1.4
million readers viewing SSD content.
Its highest ranking was #11
- achieved in Q1 2008 - when the company re-entered the SSD market after a 20
year absence. But it wasn't the leading SSD vendor back then either.
Tom's Hardware Inflamed by Solidata's Watts Guzzling SSD
Editor:-
March 18, 2009 - a test report published yesterday on Tom's
Hardware says it was shocked by the high power consumption of Solidata's
2.5" flash SSDs.
The
publication said it was an "insult" to other oems in the
SSD market, effectively
tarnishing the reputation which hard-disk-form-factor SSDs had established
in delivering better
performance at lower power consumption than
HDDs. ...read
the article
SiliconDrives Get Speedups
Editor:- March 17, 2009 -
SiliconSystems
today announced it will ship a new, faster -
3rd generation
- of its SLC
SiliconDrives in the 2nd quarter of 2009 - with capacities up to 128GB.
SiliconDrive
III products include 2.5" SATA and PATA and 1.8" SATA products that
offer read speeds up to 100MB/s and write speeds to 80MB/s.
"The
faster speeds and larger capacities of SiliconDrive III will help enable new
multimedia data streaming applications such as IPTV, Video on Demand (VOD) and
digital video surveillance appliances that require a high level of performance
and reliability where failure is not an option" said Gary Drossel, vp of
product planning at SiliconSystems.
Editor's comments:- SiliconSystems' SSDs have never been the
fastest and I had
always assumed this was because of
design trade-offs
which included more intensive
reliability-related
processes in the on-board controller while coming in at a low power budget. But
in a recent discussion Gary Drossel told me they had some design techniques
in the pipeline which would do all those things plus beef up the speed too.
New ExpressCard SSDs Directory
Editor:- March 17,
2009 - StorageSearch.com
today published a new directory on the subject of
ExpressCard SSDs.
Until
now - the list of ExpressCard SSD vendors has been buried in a table in the
SSD Guide.
It's still a small market. But what really distinguishes the ExpressCard SSD
market, is that it's the easiest way for users to perform an SSD upgrade on
their own notebooks. ...read the article |
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| A reader told me that he
was interested in knowing DWPD at different operating temperatures but he didn't
have much confidence in the numbers vendors had given him. |
| what's
the state of DWPD? | | |
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