Storage news - May
2010, weeks 3 to 4the
fastest SSDs
the SSD Buyers Guide
the Top 10 SSD Companies
how fast can your SSD
run backwards?
Are you ready to
rethink enterprise RAM?
SSD Pricing - where does
all the money go?
good versus naughty
nand flash in the enterprise
Imprinting the brain
of the SSD - (SSD
branding series)
|
why the enterprise SSD ASAP
hockey stick is flat...
(the problem
with) Selling revolutionary SSDs to technology laggards
Editor:-
May 28, 2010 - in a
new blog
today - I share my analysis of why the hybrid / auto-tiering / auto-caching
enterprise SSD appliance market has been slow to get off the ground for
vendors- and why OCZ
being added to Intel
on Adaptec's
MaxIQ SSD compatibility list -
announced
yesterday - will not make them rich quick. ...read the
article
Storage in the 3rd Dimension - diary note for Creative Storage
Conference
Editor:- May 27, 2010 - the Creative Storage Conference
invites speakers,
sponsors and
visitor registration
for this 4th annual event which takes place August 3, 2010 at the Radisson
Hotel West Los Angeles in Culver City, CA. Preliminary themes for the
sessions are:-
- Content Capture: Many cameras, many effects, many storage devices
- Soothing the bits, Posting the Passion: Storage for Editing and Post
Production
- Delivering the goods: Storage for Content Delivery
- Keeping the good stuff to last: Content Archiving and Asset Management
- So that's what you mean--Entertainment and Media Users Talk About How they
Use Digital Storage
Accusys wins award for PCIe SAN
Editor:- May 26, 2010
- Accusys today
announced
that its ExaSAN has won the prestigious "Best Choice" of Computex Award in the category
of Data Storage Products.
Judges selected ExaSAN from a pool of more
than 400 products from 170 oems based on the criteria of innovation,
technical merit, and marketability. |
 |
ExaSAN connects 2x
RAID systems (upto 96
SAS/SATA disks) through a
PCIe switch to form a SAN-like
system with upto 80Gb/s bandwidth. Optimized features for the video market
include "Equalization Mode" which the company says ensures smoother
consecutive I/Os to prevent real-time frame dropping in editing applications.
See also:- PCIe
SSDs.
Memoright expected to show PCIe SSD at Computex
Editor:-
May 25, 2010 - Memoright
previewed the themes of its SSD display next week at Computex.
Memoright
will show visitors new SSDs which meet both the U.S. MIL-STD-810F/G and
China GJB standards - which include environmental tests including low
pressure for altitude testing, exposure to wide temperature (both operating and
in storage), humidity, fungus, salt fog for rust testing, shock, vibration and
so on.
As well as extending its range of
military SSDs - the
company is expected to show a new
PCIe SSD - pictured
below. |
 |
|
Seagate launches hybrid for
notebooks
Editor:- May 24, 2010 -
Seagate today launched
the Momentus
XT a 2.5" hybrid
drive - for the
notebook PC
market - which internally has a 500GB
HDD cached by a 4GB
SSD ASAP controller.
Seagate
says the new drive is OS agnostic and delivers
SSD-like
performance at the lower
price of a hard
drive.
This isn't a new concept - as you can see on this
archived
product page for the Platinum HDD from March 2008. Except that pioneering
old product from DTS was a
3.5" form factor and used a
RAM SSD. (Since then
DTS has moved on to market a
fat flash SSD
- called the Platinum M-Cell
SSD.)
In 2006 the reputation of hybrid hard drives in notebooks
(as a poor man's SSD placeholder) was ruined by the poor performance of
Microsoft's
ReadyDrive support in VISTA. So experienced users may be cautious about
Seagate's new product. Anyone who needs serious PC application performance
won't be wasting their time with a hard drive.
When Seagate introduced
7,200
RPM HDDs in 1992 computer users were impressed by its performance. But
Seagate's press release headline today - "World's Fastest Hard Drive for
Laptop Computers" - is a bit of a joke. Because hard drives aren't fast.
...Momentus
XT results on StorageReview.com
Violin preparing for relaunch?
Editor:- May 23, 2010
- Violin Memory
recently announced a
strategic
partnership with Landmark
Ventures a technology-focused strategic advisory and
investment-banking
firm.
No details were given but there have been several signs in the
past year that Violin is restructuring itself to better cope with the
competitive and growth demands of the
rackmount SSD
market. For example - earlier this month Violin announced the
appointment
of former Cisco VP Larry Lang to its board.
Violin launched
the world's 1st PCIe connected
RAM SSD in
August 2007 and
followed this up in November
2008 with a revolutionary fast flash SSD architecture. Since then it's
almost as if the company - surprised by its initial success (the
Violin 1010 Memory Appliance
was the most
popular product viewed by our readers in Q4 2008) has largely ignored the
SSD bubble and
given the appearance of a company going back into stealth mode.
This
was once a world leading SSD technology company - which maybe due to
weaknesses in funding or business development skills has not followed up its
initial burst of activity with the expected follow up momentum. My guess is
that today's cryptic announcement in an indication that the missing parts of the
business jigsaw are being put into place.
Nexenta streams online tv
Editor:- May 20, 2010 -
Nexenta Systems
announced
that its products (which include
SSD ASAP features)
are being used by the Dutch Public
Broadcasting Agency NPO for storing and delivering online tv in a
configuration which includes 192TB of
hard disk drives and a
1.9TB SSD read cache.
The
broadcaster's website has approximately 80TB of video available to online
users who want to watch previously broadcasted television programs. During an
average evening, between 10 and 20,000 people stream data, adding up to 25GB in
capacity. The customer (who evaluated multiple vendors ) says that important
selection criteria were:- performance, price, support and power
consumption. See also:- SSDs
in the tv / movie creation, IPTV server and tv viewing markets
Solid Access launches very fast NAS SLC SSD
Editor:-
May 20, 2010 -Solid
Access Technologies today
launched the
UNAS
100 a very fast 2U
rackmount
NAS SLC
fat flash SSD
- with 2.4TB capacity, 96GB DRAM Cache, 2x 10GbE ports, 300,000
IOPS,
1,000MB/s bandwidth and under 10 microseconds access time.
Editor's
comments:- this is the 1st
flash SSD system
from Solid Access - which has been in the
RAM SSD market for 8
years and has often appeared in our directory of
the fastest SSDs.
As you'd expect - the new system includes enterprise
SSD reliability
features - and the flash modules are hot swappable and can be mirrored.
...Later:-
June 4, 2010 - I was curious to learn more about the flash SSD modules inside
the UNAS 100 - so I asked Tomas Havrda, Managing Partner at Solid
Access Technologies for more info. He confirmed 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."
SandForce launches SSD chip branding program
Editor:-
May 18, 2010 - SandForce
today officially
announced
a branding program called - SandForce
Driven SSDs.
Editor's comments:- This effectively confirms
StorageSearch.com's analysis of
the company's marketing efforts which we had described in the past year as "SandForce
inside" SSDs.
SandForce was already the best known
SSD SoC company in the
SSD market - confirmed by
its high listings in StorageSearch.com's quarterly
Top 10 SSD Lists
which have tracked the SSD search volume of millions of readers. The new
branding campaign leverages this - and the company clearly aspires to
maintain this early lead - in the same way that Intel did with it
famous
Intel inside program which was designed to obliterate the x86 microprocessor
clone makers (and x86 licensees too).
But unlike the Intel program
(which played on the fact that you did need an Intel architecture processor
chip to run Microsoft's PC operating system) - you don't need a SandForce
controller chip to make a fast SSD. That includes SSD companies like
STEC,
Pliant Technology,
Density Dynamics,
Micron,
Fusion-io (and many
other companies) who make SSDs which are faster than SandForce-driven products
but use their own proprietary IP.
And even SandForce customers
who find it convenient to fill product line gaps with SandForce driven SSDs
- don't necessarily want to reveal that to the outside world.
There are
many SSD companies I can think of who do use SandForce controllers - but
may not wish to join a branding program like this which implies that
their SSDs are the same as all the others listed. That could be because they
have added their own IP or are adding other
high reliability
features and don't want customers to think that their products are merely
clones - or that their internal technology resources are weaker than they'd like
their customers to think.
See also:- Imprinting the brain of
the SSD - How the market went from:- Who cares? to You care!
about the identity of
SSD controllers. |
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