Micron's embedded memory
market video
Editor:- July 21, 2010 - Micron's VP of Embedded
Solutions, Glen Hawk discusses the company's strategy with respect to the
embedded memory market
and how the Numonyx
business (which they acquired in February for $1.3 billion) fits in - in a
video
interview on YouTube which also mentions prospects for extending the life of
NOR architectures using PCM and also hints at other applications - which I
assume are SSDs.
$8 million financing for virtualization ISV Actifio
Editor:-
July 21, 2010 - Actifio
today announced $8 million in
Series A financing for its data management virtualization technology -
which virtualizes vendor-independent physical or cloud-based storage devices
into a private, public or hybrid storage cloud infrastructure.
This financing
was led by North Bridge Venture Partners
and Greylock Partners.
Editor's
comments:- let's hope they do a better job of managing their customers'
resources than their own website - which was working OK earlier today and later
gave this message - "This Google App Engine application is temporarily over
its serving quota. Please try again later."
WD reports revenue
Editor:- July 21, 2010 - Western Digital
today reported $9.8 billion revenue and net income of $1.4 billion for the
fiscal year ended July 2, 2010.
Editor's comments:- WD's annual revenue is 21% higher
than
FY
2008 ($8.1 billion) - the period just before the credit crunch.
But
if you compare the total revenue in the HDD market (for all companies) 2008
compared to today - you'll see it's essentially the same. Market share has
shifted in that time - with WD gaining at the expense of Seagate.
PCIe SSDs steam enterprise Oracle clouds
Editor:-
July 21, 2010 - Texas
Memory Systems today
announced
that its RamSan-20
models (PCIe SSDs)
have been deployed by Mercury
Technology (a leading provider of
Oracle
enterprise cloud services).
"We chose Texas Memory Systems
because it is the only company that has such a long history in this technology,"
Brian Day, VP of Sales at Mercury Technology. "...It's important to have a
partner that is not only knowledgeable, but who also has first-hand experience
with other customers running Oracle software.... We wanted to offer our clients
the stability that only Texas Memory Systems offers today."
"Some of the biggest, most demanding Oracle customers are
hosted with Mercury Technology so we were delighted that it chose our RamSan
solid state disks over all competing alternatives," said Jamon Bowen,
Director of Sales Engineering at Texas Memory Systems. "RamSan solutions
are a proven way to
turbo
charge Oracle performance."
DCIG article about PCIe SSDs
Editor:- July 20, 2010 -
DCIG has published
an article -
Identifying
the Right SSD Architecture which describes the thinking behind some
PCIe SSDs - and in
particular those designed by the article's sponsor Fusion-io.
One
of the disadvantages of the Fusion-io architecture (in my view) is that if you
install it into a slow legacy server - it will not give you the same speedup
as some other designs which offload more of their internal housekeeping
functions to an onboard SSD
controller. That difference magnifies if you fit multiple SSDs into the same
PCIe bus.
At the other end of the scale, however, the Fusion-io design
includes future-proofing for the server oems who design it in - because to some
extent the performance will scale upwards automatically when they deploy
the same SSDs into newer faster multi-core CPUs in new models of their
servers.
These very big differences are part of what I call the Legacy
versus New Dynasty segmentation model - which has been happening in the
rackmount SSD market
for several years. Superficially similar looking products actually address
very different markets - and if you know which side of the divide you're on
(and it can be different sides for different projects in the same enterprise)
that can shortcut your vendor qualification processes.
You can read
more about fundamental disagreement within the SSD industry in an article
here on StorageSearch.com called
the
the SSD Heresies.
MOSAID and Nanya sign 7 year DRAM patents agreement
Editor:-
July 20, 2010 - MOSAID
Technologies today
announced
that it has licensed its DRAM patents to Nanya Technology as
part of a 7 year, royalty bearing patent portfolio agreement.
Seagate shipped 193 million HDDs in past year
Editor:-
July 20, 2010 - Seagate
today
reported
$11.4 billion revenue and net income of $1.61 billion for the fiscal
year ended July 2, 2010 in which the company shipped 193 million disk drives.
Editor's comments:- Seagate's annual revenue is 16%
higher than
FY
2009 - which sounds good. But it's 10% lower than
FY
2008 ($12.7 billion) - the period just before the credit crunch - which in
my view is a more realistic comparison if you're looking at long term
HDD market trends.
when the SSD brand sends the wrong signal
Editor:-
July 20, 2010 - StorageSearch.com
has published a new article -
when the SSD brand
sends the wrong signal.
This is the 1st in a new series of
articles about branding strategies in the
SSD market. ...read the article
How can SSDs change your life? - the movie
Editor:-
July 19, 2010 - as an alternative to
SSD market research
- which is hard to digest, and those long powerpoints and complicated
spreadsheets can send you to sleep - Kingston's SSD
marketers have launched a
competition to learn how users might really benefit from using their SSDs.
It
involves uploading a video with the theme "How Can a Kingston® SSDNow
Drive Change Your Life?". 1st prize is $7,500. If your video wins - they
might use it promotions (but you won't get any royalties). See also:-
SSD videos -
StorageSearch.com's pick of the best on the web.
SSD fundamentals seminar -pre Flash Memory Summit
Editor:-
July 19, 2010 - Chuck
Sobey, on behalf of KnowledgeTek will
present a 4 hour seminar on the fundamentals of
SSDs - in one of the pre
conference sessions of the Flash
Memory Summit August 16.
This tutorial is designed for
engineers, managers, and executives who need to make immediate decisions about
whether to use SSDs in their data center or products. See also:-
SSD Training
Nimbus improves features in NAS SSD
Editor:- July 19,
2010 - Nimbus Data
Systems today announced
higher
density in its 10GbE 2U rackmount SSD systems - 10TB (enterprise MLC)
- implemented as 24 x 400GB hot-swappable
SAS flash blades.
The
company also announced improved connectivity - upto 120Gbps - from its internal
12 port FlexConnect 'virtual switch' which makes all storage available to all
ports without the need to create and assign volumes to specific ports. Every
port can run all supported protocols –
iSCSI, CIFS and NFS –
simultaneously, enabling unified block and file storage and converged
networking. Pricing for a 10TB system with FlexConnect is just under $110k.
Memoright announces new US distributor
Editor:- July
16, 2010 - Memoright
this week announced a new authorized distributor for their SSDs in the US -
First Commercial
Technologies based in Beverly Hills, CA.
Editor's
comments:- distributing
2.5" SSDs has
been a risky business because consumer SSD
fashions and
prices have changed
really fast. But knowledgeable SSD resellers can be a useful source of advice
for SOHOs and SMBs.
There's not much on FCT's new website at the
moment. But Jonny Brownleader at FCT - who sent me this news - had previously
been selling flash SSDs for a couple of years at
RocketDisk.
SANpulse announces 280% revenue growth for storage migration
Editor:-
July 15, 2010 - SANpulse
today announced
revenue growth of 280% in the 1st and 2nd quarters of 2010 compared to
the year ago quarters.
This results from continued Fortune 500
enterprise adoption of the company's
SANlogics solution to
simplify and automate storage migration and data center consolidation. In 2010
SANpulse reached new technology deployment milestones, transforming and
optimizing more than 25,000 servers attached to over 40PB of data.
Editor's
comments:- It's especially impressive growth for a company who has
zero
occurrences of the word "SSD" on its website.
It
demonstrates that the storage
market universe is very big indeed.
Though not as big as the web
universe. Take a look at this interesting article -
Want More
Readers? Try Expanding Your Internet Universe - on
Copyblogger.com - in which I
recognized the eternal truth of author Brian Clark's observation that "Someone
out there in the Internet-universe is struggling with something you learned 3
years ago."
Yeah. Who would have thought all that all that
nichey SSD
endurance and SSD
reliability stuff would ever be of interest to a mass audience? Those SSD
articles were published 5 years ago. Guess I'll have to wait another 5 years
before some of my more recent articles - like
this way to the
Petabyte SSD - strike the right chord.
See also:- Solaris
Migration - resources and articles.
Nimble Storage enters the ASAP market
Editor:- July
15, 2010 - Nimble
Storage announced the release of the
Nimble CS-Series
an iSCSI compatible
SSD ASAP which has
been optimized for backup and compression performance.
The model
CS240 has 18TB of primary storage and 216TB backup. At launch pricing was
under $3/GB (usable) for primary storage and $0.25/GB for backup storage. |
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| SSDs - the big picture |
| Editor:-
StorageSearch.com was the
world's 1st publication to provide continuous editorial coverage and analysis
of SSDs (in 1998) and in the 12 years which have followed we've led the market
through many interesting and confusing times. |
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If you often find yourself
explaining to your VC, lawyer or non technical BBQ guests why you spend so
much time immersed in SSD web pages - and need a single, simple, non very
technical reference to suggest - this may be the link they need. | | | |
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