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the new dedupe? - Permabit
inside
Editor:- June 7, 2010 - Permabit today
announced that its high performance
data deduplication
software has achieved multiple design wins with leading OEMs who will embed
it in storage solutions coming to market by the end of 2010.
Permabit
says its
Albireo dedupe
architecture scales to petabytes of network storage (FC, iSCSI, NFS, or
CIFS), has application aware tuning and can deliver upto 800MB/s ingest on dual
quad core processors with an extremely small memory footprint.
HDD shipments expected to double in 5 years
Editor:-
June 7, 2010 - Coughlin
Associates has published its 14th annual
HDD
Capital Equipment and Technology Report (pdf) (189 pages / $7,000).
Fueling
the need for more capex the authors anticipate that disk drive volumes will
more than double - from about 670M in 2010 to 1.4B in 2015 - and that
technology developments will result in
HDDs with following
maximum capacities:- 10TB 3.5", 5TB 2.5" and 1TB
1.8" .
Editor's
comments:- in my article -
this way to the
Petabyte SSD - I said that the highest capacity 2.5" - bulk archive
SSDs - (a product category which doesn't exist yet) could store 50TB in 2016 -
which would be 10x the best hard drives - and with better R/W
performance and a lower power footprint.
I also said that a key
difference would be that the SSD could use wire-speed compression (with minimal
impact on R/W performance) to deliver even more virtual storage capacity.
It's the combination of SSD's unique factors which will make the
difference in big disk backup
systems at the end of this decade - not just the raw media cost / density
which transfixes many market commentators. Will there still be a market for
hard drives? - Yes. And much bigger volumes than today. But not in the
datacenter or the enterprise. See also:-
Can you
trust SSD market data?
Solid Access reveals fast NAS SSD rackmount has SAS inside
Editor:-
June 4, 2010 - I was curious to learn more about the flash SSD modules inside
the
UNAS
100 - a very fast
rackmount
NAS SLC flash SSD
launched last month .
- so I asked Tomas Havrda, Managing Partner for more info.
He
confirmed my guess that the internal interface in the rackmount SSD is
SAS - an interface
with which they are very familiar - having shipped the world's 1st SAS RAM SSD
in 2005.
"After a search of almost 2 years, we partnered with a
Flash SSD vendor that provided the type of sustained, predictable performance
Solid Access required to bring an entry to market. This has always been one of
the major attributes of our DRAM SSD appliances and we needed to find Flash
technology that reasonably approximates this capability to continue to project
Solid Access's image as a high performance storage appliance vendor offering
products that will perform next month or next year the same way as today.
"We were also equally concerned about
performance drop off
from Burst to Steady State mode and our selected vendor has the least
performance loss of the vendors we tested or have been able to obtain results
for."
He didn't say whose SSD module they use. The advantage of
using a pre-existing product is
performance and
reliability and
lower cost in low
volumes - compared to the cost of making your own flash SSD which is only a
lower cost - if it works and after you've sold enough of them to amortize the
cost of the initial design. These tradeoffs are discussed in
3 Easy Ways to Enter
the SSD Market.
chipmakers rehash trashed flash cached HDD concept
Editor:-
June 3, 2010 - Objective
Analysis published a new white paper -
Flash
Cache is Back (pdf) in which they argue the case for their belief that soon
all computing platforms will employ a cache layer between the
HDD and the
DRAM.
The author
Jim Handy points out that early projections from
notebook SSD
makers that SSDs would already have replaced tens of millions of HDDs were over
optimistic and may "never happen". Instead Handy says that a flash
cache, supported by a properly designed
SSD ASAP controller
"will provide near-SSD performance at near-HDD prices".
Early
implementations of such flash cache schemes from vendors named in the article
didn't work properly - which he says is partly because the ratio of flash to
magnetic capacity was too small. The article says that - several
SSD controller
companies - including Denali
Software are working on new solutions. And that it's simpler for these to be
implemented in SLC
rather than MLC flash. ...read
the article (pdf)
Editor's comments:- in my 2007
article - How
Solid is Hard Disk's Future? I explained why "entertainment PCs"
would remain a safe haven for HDDs for several years. Will a new generation of
hybrid storage
work any better than previous designs? In a news related article (May 17, 2010) - I
listed the reasons I thought the SSD ASAP concept couldn't be scaled down
to a single flash SSD cached hard drive. (Which is the opposite view to the new
predictions by Objective Analysis.)
And the market opportunity window
is short. In my view the magnetic storage industry has 5 or 6 years to do
consumer market experiments on this problem before
flash SSDs come below
the price/capacity TCO of the highest capacity HDDs - which I expect
will also involve SLC rather than MLC flash (but for very different reasons).
If you're interested in storage cache dynamics see also:-
RAM Cache Ratios
in flash SSDs.
SSD event - Flash Memory Summit
Editor:- June 2, 2010
-StorageSearch.com is a
media sponsor of the Flash
Memory Summit which takes place in August in Santa Clara, Calif.
The
main theme of the event will be
SSDs
. Go to
www.FlashMemorySummit.com to
see preliminary info about the 3 day
conference,
exhibition
and how you can take part.
ever wondered - why a NAS from Avere Systems will solve your
problems?
Editor:- June 1, 2010 - Avere Systems today
published an opinion piece article called -
5 Things to Consider
Before Upgrading Your NAS.
It talks about
HDDs versus
SSDs (a
long
running theme with our readers) and suggests that buying a
NAS compatible
SSD ASAP - like the
one they design and sell - is a really good idea.
I just use this
example to illustrate why you don't see many vendor written articles here on
StorageSearch.com. Even if some
of the sentiments appear reasonable - the overall quality of the "analysis"
in vendor originated articles is often patchy. The sweeping market assertions
are often incorrect. And the remedies to user "problems" are
suspiciously unique. ...read
the article
OCZ's PCIe SSD Saga - episode 5 or 6?
Editor:- June
1, 2010 - OCZ today
unveiled the RevoDrive a bootable
PCIe SSD with R/W
speeds up to 540MB/s and 530MB/s respectively and 75,000
IOPS.
Editor's comments:- OCZ has been announcing successively
faster PCIe SSDs since
March 2009.
From
my viewpoint it has looked a lot like watching a serialized version of the
mythical race between
the tortoise
and the hare - in which OCZ has been playing the part of the tortoise -
starting with pitifully slow products compared to industry leaders - in a
segment whose sole reason for being is speed - and then in successive episodes
seeing OCZ inching upwards in R/W speeds and IOPS through many press releases
over many quarters - until by a cunning genetic twist in the plot the tortoise
today is starting to resemble the hare we saw back in episode #1.
I'm
unclear as to whether OCZ's earlier PCIe SSD "products" were genuine
attempts to fill market needs - or merely "web marketing"
placeholders - designed to put an RSS stake in the ground for a consumer market
which isn't ready to buy this type of product in volume yet - but is
anticipating tasty crumbs from the enterprise SSD accelerator banquet
currently being hosted by Fusion-io
and Texas Memory Systems
- and being packaged for take-out in a fat pizza box designed by
NextIO. Whatever the
past thinking has been - the new scriptwriters are making the OCZ tortoise
appear like a more serious character than it was in the pilot episode.
SSD searches maintain double digit growth
Editor:-
June 1, 2010 - StorageSearch.com's
overall readership in May 2010 increased 15% compared to a year ago -
for all subjects - not just SSDs.
Pageviews for the
SSD Buyers Guide
increased 25%, pageviews for the top 5 SSD articles increased an average
of 26% and searches for "SSD" (the #1 incoming search term
referred from external search engines) grew 42% year on year.
"Thousands
of web sites now talk about SSDs" said editor Zsolt Kerekes. "The
SSD Bookmarks Series
- launched last year - was designed to help readers find high quality external
SSD articles recommended by industry leaders. There are more coming in this
series - and later a new SSD bookmarks series - will include moderated
suggestions from any readers."
Indilinx supplies SSD controllers to Hitachi
Editor:-
June 1, 2010 - Indilinx
announced
it is supplying SSD
controllers for use in a hybrid storage module - called the HyDrive -
designed by Hitachi-LG
Data Storage - which includes a 32GB flash SSD integrated with a
Blu-ray optical drive.
"HLDS
has been the global leader and technology innovator in
optical disk market.
With the introduction of HyDrive with INDILINX Barefoot SSD controller solution,
we are demonstrating once again that HLDS is the leader in ODD market,"
said Luke Choi, HyDrive Team Leader at HLDS. "HyDrive will offer all the
benefits of ODD + SSD in
ODD form factor... delivering the best performance boost and lowest power
consumption in the minimal available space."
SanDisk samples new netbook / notebook SSDs
Editor:-
June 1, 2010 - SanDisk
is sampling higher capacity versions of its
netbook
compatible SSD modules with upto 128GB capacity.
SanDisk says
the "mSATA mini" form factor - which is 26.8mm x 30 mm x 3.4 mm -
is its "tiniest" SATA
compatible SSD. If you need
even smaller SSDs click
here.
The company is also sampling 256GB models in its notebook SSD
range - the SSD G4 - which has sequential R/W speeds upto 220MB/s and 160MB/s
and burst random 4KB performance of up to 600 IOPS.
In an effort
to allay user worries about
flash wear-out
- SanDisk says the G4 is rated for 160TB of writing - which they say is "sufficient
for over 10 years of PC usage." However, you wouldn't want to use this
drive in an SSD backup
system - because in that application it would last less than 2 years. |
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