Ramtron's
F-RAM Casualty of Auto Market Crash
Editor:- May 7, 2009 -
Ramtron said
its revenue
declined
26% in the 1st quarter of 2009 compared to the year ago period.
A
sharp decline in orders from the automotive market was cited as a principal
cause.
Ramtron also announced an update on a legal suit related to
in-field failures of one of its F-RAM memory products in an unspecified
application. (In July 2008 Ramtron confirmed that specific batches of product
had failed due to manufacturing
process
defects in one of its partners fabs.)
Ramtron also announced
today that, over the next 2 years, it will transition the manufacturing of
products that are currently being built at Fujitsu's chip foundry located in
Iwate, Japan to its foundry at Texas Instruments in Dallas, Texas and to its
newest foundry at IBM Corp in Essex Junction, Vermont.
APOGEE Mars SSD Aims at Gamers Market
Editor:- May 7,
2009 - Walton
Chaintech launched its
APOGEE
Mars SSD for the "hardcore gamers market".
Includes
512MB mobile SDRAM buffer, capacity upto 250GB, R/W speeds upto 250MB/s and
180MB/s respectively.
New Book on Enterprise Storage
Editor:- May 7, 2009
- EMC has
published a new book (480 pages $60) -
"Information Storage and
Management".
The book's 40 contributing writers cover the
evolution of storage technology, including traditional deployment, consolidated
storage networking and storage virtualization, while also addressing the most
prevalent storage technologies, including direct attached storage (DAS),
networked attached storage (NAS), storage area networks (SAN), content addressed
storage (CAS), and IP SAN.
Here's a quote from the
intro...
"Not long ago, information storage was seen as only a bunch of disks or
tapes attached to the back of the computer to store data..."
Yes -
I remember those bad
old days
(pre 1998) before people thought of storage as a single market. It sounds like
an interesting book.
You can never learn too much about storage. The 9
year old classic Storage
Architecture Guide is still a popular article today. See also:- Storage Training
How are things going at StorageSearch.com?
Editor:-
May 7, 2009 - I've been asked that question a lot recently.
Nearly
everyone is talking about how their business is being hit by the credit crunch.
And even Google has been
hit
by a sequential slowdown in web advertising. My answer is a little embarrassing
- but here goes.
Sun Turns Up Heat on flash SSD Hype
Editor:- May 5,
2009 - Sun Microsystems
re-entered the hype zone today with an
announcement
that hundreds of customers across a range of industries have purchased its
flash SSD accelerated storage systems.
I don't wish to be unkind to
anyone still working for the company... But if they had followed the advice
which I offered 5
years ago about the unique opportunities for them in the SSD market - and
done something about it a lot sooner than they in fact did - perhaps
Sun itself as a company would have been worth a lot more (to Oracle,
IBM or whoever) than merely the accumulated sum which Sun had spent on
acquiring other storage
companies. Or maybe they wouldn't have been up for sale at all.
STEC Confirms IBM Server Connection
Editor:- May 5,
2009 - STEC
today
confirmed rumors that its Zeus-IOPS SSDs have indeed been oemed by IBM in several popular
servers and storage systems.
Editor's comments:- oem
announcements generally follow 1 of 2 patterns.
- lovey-dovey - in which the companies say nice things about each
other. That's definitely the tone of this one... "We enjoyed
collaborating with STEC as a key solid state technology provider," said
Mike Desens, VP of systems design, IBM.
- legalese - in which it's easy to imagine that the text of the press
release is simply a lightly edited version of the contract between the 2
companies.
If you're interested in who's oeming whose SSDs - see the
table in my recent
article. |
|
| Aleratec
Names New VP Sales and Marketing |
Editor:- May 5,
2009 - Aleratec
today named
Howard Wing to lead the company's sales and marketing activities.
Howard Wing's recent experience includes VP of Sales and Marketing at
Plextor where he was
actively involved in industry initiatives to bring
USB 2.0 and
SATA interfaces to
the optical disc markets.
Sonics Solves Complex On-chip Connectivity Problems
MILPITAS,
Calif., - May 5, 2009 - Sonics, Inc. has announced the Sonics Network
for AMBA Protocol or SNAP.
The product is a cost-effective,
turn-key solution designed to simplify the on-chip bus design for complex
embedded SoCs by turning multilayer bus designs into an IP block. SNAP's
easy-to-use development environment allows developers to quickly and intuitively
capture their design with little or no training.
As the number of IP cores in embedded SoC designs continues to grow,
current bus structures are becoming complex and time consuming to design. In
addition, memory access problems can arise because there are now multiple
processors competing for memory resources. SNAP addresses both of these problems
by first turning the complex interconnection of multiple cores into a customized
IP block, thus reducing the chip design effort. And 2nd, SNAP improves the
overall data flow in the systems, thereby improving bus performance and
eliminating memory bottlenecks.
...Sonics profile
Editor's
comments:- this is the kind of technology needed inside very high speed
next generation SFF SSDs.
PLX Unveils Single Chip PCIe-to-USB 2.0 Host Controller Bridge
Editor:-
May 4, 2009 - PLX
Technology announced volume production of the OXPCIe200 ($7.65) - a
high-performance
PCIe-to-USB 2.0
single-chip host controller bridge.
The new device delivers up to
62.5Mb/s data throughput, has a low power requirement of 300mW, and a small
footprint (9x9mm) Thin Array Plastic Package.
storage chips
DDRdrive Launches Low Cost PCIe RAM SSD
Editor:- May
4, 2009 - DDRdrive
emerged from stealth mode and launched the
DDRdrive X1 - a
PCIe compatible
RAM SSD with onboard
flash backup. |
| Load / restore time is 60S. I/O
performance is over 200K IOPS (for 512B blocks). For 4kB blocks IOPS is:- 50k
(reads) and 35K (writes). R/W throughput is 215MB/s and 155MB/s respectively.
Capacity is 4GB. OS compatibility:- Microsoft Windows (various). Price is
$1,495. |
..... |
 |
| ............................................................................... |
| Using Microsoft Windows
built-in RAID support,
DDRdrive X1's can be spanned (capacity), striped (performance), mirrored
(redundancy), and RAID-5 configured. | |
Editor's
comments:- the DDRdrive X1 looks competitively priced for accelerating
database applications in which the hot files can be squeezed into a capacity
range from about 4GB to 12GB. Above that - you get into the region of entry
level
rackmount SSDs
and high performance PCIe
flash SSD cards
from companies like Fusion-io
and Texas Memory Systems.
There's definitely a gap in the market for this scale of product (low
entry price, low capacity - high IOPS). For the past year or so DDRdrive
shipped an earlier generation of its SSD accelerators exclusively to a large
enterprise for secret internal projects.
BakBone Acquires Effective Assets of Asempra
Editor:-
May 4, 2009 - BakBone
Software has
acquired
certain assets from Asempra
Technologies.
Under the terms of the agreement, BakBone has
agreed to issue 3,846,154 common shares and to pay cash consideration of
approximately $350,000, plus accrued royalties.
Editor's comments:- an article in
TheRegister
speculates that Asempra's VCs
(having already invested $29 million) pulled the plug on the cash draining
Asempra. This brings the gone-away
storage companies list to 491.
Emulex says "No" to a future "Connecting everything®"
Editor:- May 4, 2009 - Emulex announced today
it has
rejected
an unsolicited acquisition offer from Broadcom.
...Later:-
May 5, 2009 - Broadcom
extended
the deadline for their offer and published a press release saying what a
great deal it would be for shareholders. "Broadcom's all-cash offer is not
subject to a financing condition. Broadcom intends to fund the offer with its
existing cash holdings."
Emulex, in its rejection letter, had
pointed to the potential value in recent design wins. Broadcom rubbished this
assertion with this pithy analysis.
"... while Emulex has touted
its "design wins" in its response to Broadcom and in other
communications with the financial community, it has failed to demonstrate an
ability to convert design wins into either revenue growth or market share.
Over the last several years, including this most recent quarter, Emulex has
continued to lose share to its larger competitor (QLogic)."
Editor's
comments:- the FC,
10GbE and
InfiniBand adapter
markets used to be pivotal enabling tools for fast
SANs in the enterprise
server computing market. However, in recent times these network technologies
have become commodities - and their prospects
have waned..
As I've said before, the future of fast storage interconnects will be dominated
by the requirements of the SSD
market instead of the HDD
market. Redeploying the intellectual property of these storage connections
into closer proximity with solid state storage is something which the
traditional HBA business model cannot achieve - or which takes too long.
Broadcom's
mission statement "Connecting everything®" is more in line with
the future vision of the computer market than the old-style duopoly of Emulex
(and QLogic) which dominate a market that's going to become irrelevant.
RunCore Offers 256GB SSD Upgrade for $890
Editor:-
May 1, 2009 - RunCore
announced pricing
for its new Pro IV 2.5"
SSD user installable PC / Mac upgrades which will ship in 2 weeks.
These
SSDs clone externally via USB
and then run internally via
SATA. Street price
for the 256GB model is expected to be approx $890. |
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| Surviving SSD
sudden power loss |
Why should you care
what happens in an SSD when the power goes down?
This important design
feature - which barely rates a mention in most SSD datasheets and press releases
- has a strong impact on
SSD data integrity
and operational
reliability.
This article will help you understand why some
SSDs which (work perfectly well in one type of application) might fail in
others... even when the changes in the operational environment appear to be
negligible. |
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| the 3 fastest PCIe
SSDs? |
Are you tied up in
knots trying to shortlist flash SSD accelerators ranked according to
published comparative benchmarks?
You know the sort of thing I mean -
where a magazine compares 10 SSDs or a blogger compares 2 SSDs against each
other. It would be nice to have a shortlist so that you don't have to waste too
much of your own valuable time testing unsuitable candidates wouldn't it?
StorageSearch's long running
fastest SSDs directory
typically indicates 1 main product in each form factor category but those
examples may not be compatible with your own ecosystem.
If so a
new article -
the 3 fastest PCIe
SSDs list (or is it really lists?) may help you cut that Gordian
knot. Hmm... you may be thinking that StorageSearch's editor never gives easy
answers to SSD questions if more complicated ones are available.
|
 |
But in this case you'd be
wrong. (I didn't say you'd like the answers, though.) ...read the article | | | | |
