Fusion-io demos 1 million
IOPS SSD card
Editor:- November 18, 2010 - Fusion-io (a
PCIe SSD company) this
week set new speed
records with its double-wide slot
ioDrive
Octal SSD - achieving 1 million
IOPS 6.2
GB/s of bandwidth while offering capacity up to 5.7TB.
Dataram's SSD ASAP accelerates rocket defense science
Editor:-
November 18, 2010 - ever since the first
SSD ASAPs came to
market just over a year ago - I've been curious to know what type of real
customers would get a benefit from this new type of technology.
Dataram this week
provided a clue. It
says
that Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab has purchased and
installed Dataram's XcelaSAN
acceleration appliance for use in its missile defense research. Dataram also
provides server and workstation
memory products to JHU/APL.
new book - Inside NAND Flash
Editor:- November 17,
2010 - Forward
Insights (an SSD
analyst company) is one of the contributers to a new book called -
Inside
NAND Flash Memories.
The publishers say that SSD designers must
understand flash technology in order to exploit its benefits and countermeasure
its weaknesses. The new book is a comprehensive guide to the NAND world -
from circuits design (analog and digital) to reliability.
look again - update on Violin's SSD business
Editor:-
November 17, 2010 - Violin
Memory (which makes
rackmount SSDs)
recently unveiled a
multi-terabyte
SSD cache solution for NAS
systems which use NFS.
Violin says its
vCACHE expands to
15TB of useable cache and delivers over 300,000 NFS operations per second over
8x 10GbE ports. It uses software from
Gear6 which Violin
acquired in June 2010 after the
software developer had
burned its way through $24 million
funding and crashed.
Editor's
comments:- I spoke to
Don
Basile, CEO of Violin Memory, and
Matt
Barletta a few days ago to get a current view of how the company sees
itself, competitors and the SSD market. ...click here to read the
interview
Intel invests in SSD controller company
Editor:-
November 16, 2010 - Anobit
today
announced that it closed a new funding round of $32 million led by Intel
Capital - bringing Anobit's total funding to over $70 million.
Editor's comments:- unlike another well known
SSD controller company
(can you remember what they're called - without me prompting?) - Anobit is a
company which until today has been known by a very small number of analysts -
and competitors and maybe even some
SSD companies who might be
using their products.
I'm sure that - as a result of today's
announcement - they will get better known. But it's always much harder when
you're the 2nd company in a market concept - and come in much later. Still
can't remember that other name? That's why
SSD branding
will be an important factor in the next year or so.
NextIO demos 4 million IOPS 4U rackmount SSD
Editor:-
November 16, 2010 -
NextIO (a
PCIe
rackmount SSD
company) demonstrated over 4 million IOPS and 10TB capacity in a 4U SSD system
attached to 3GHz Opteron servers at Supercomputing 2010 today.
The
new vSTOR S200
- which has 16x Fusion-io
ioMemory cards inside will be generally available in early 2011.
Editor's
comments:- it's easy to fall into the trap of thinking that all you need to
do to design a fast SSD box is to stuff a box with
fast SSDs. But if
the internal bandwidth and latency isn't right - the incremental performance
you get from adding each SSD can drop considerably. NextIO specializes in
designing scalable PCIe accelerator boxes.
Virident gets 2nd round funding
Editor:- November 16,
2010 -
Virident Systems
(a PCIe SSD company) announced that it has
closed a new round of
funding led by Sequoia Capital.
The Series B round was co-led by
another new investor, Globespan Capital Partners, together with participation
from existing investors including Artiman Ventures who see continued value in
Virident's vision for solid-state storage solutions in the
enterprise
datacenter. The funding will be used to accelerate Virident's solid-state
storage solutions and scale to address this rapidly growing market demand.
"Solid-state storage is the fastest growing segment of the
storage market. Virident is positioned as the leader in the PCIe-based Flash
enterprise segment," said Mike Goguen, a partner at Sequoia Capital. "Virident's
Flash expertise has created a disruptive and unique solution to the rapidly
growing data-intensive enterprise-class application workloads such as rich
media, web2.0, data analytics, and social media. Virident's tachIOn is the first
solution that delivers on the growing requirement for
Tier-0 storage
solutions: fast storage that occupies the space between servers and traditional
hard-drive storage solutions on the server-side and/or the storage-side."
Editor's comments:- like mothers,
VCs talk up the
accomplishments of their toddlers.
Virident is starting to walk in a
market marathon which started some years earlier. But by studying the de
facto "leaders" in the PCIe SSD market - Virident may be able to
steer a course which is easier. The enterprise PCIe SSD market is - in my view
- already a year further along the market growth curve (bigger) than
Virident's founders probably assumed when they started. There's more business
to be had - but customers have more choices too.
SSDs ensure smooth running in Penguin's new IceBreaker
Editor:-
November 15, 2010 -
Penguin Computing
recently
launched
a new family of fast 160TB DAS
RAID storage systems which
the company says provides the performance and scalability of 40Gbps
InfiniBand
environments.
Called
IceBreaker -
it's designed for high workflow apps like scientific modeling - which don't
need the "frills" (and cost) associated with similar capacity
SAN systems.
Editor's
comments:- I asked the question - does
solid state storage feature
in any significant way in the new product architecture? If so - at what
level and managed how?
Penguin Computing said - "IceBreaker uses Solid State storage
for 3 different purposes:
1) - In all IceBreaker units local operating system and user data
are on separate disks. For internal OS drive IceBreakers use small capacity
solid state device. Motivation for this choice was ruggedness of the solid
state devices - failed OS drive would be very disruptive and cumbersome to
recover.
2) - In our scalable IceBreaker SX configuration SSDs
are used in the Lustre Metadata Server (MDS) node to accelerate the Lustre
metadata transactions. MDS node is an IceBreaker 2716 unit with 8 or 16 solid
state devices and high performance RAID. High IOps rates of the enterprise SSDs
are well suited for this role.
3) For transaction-oriented
demanding workloads IceBreaker FX solution can be implemented with an IB 2716
building block populated with up to 16 high performance SSD devices. Depending
on the workload requirements this storage subsystem can be connected to
application servers or clients using a 10GigE or InfiniBand QDR attachment
which closely matches the throughput potential of the SSD RAID array." |
Editor again:-
Penguins and icebreakers came together in a novel I wrote in 2001 called -
Pirates and Goblins -
from which the image on the right appears.
Penguin Computing was
already featured in my article -
Animal Brands
and Metaphors in the Storage Market - in which I have demonstrated that mice
are not the only animals in data storage. |
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| what StorageSearch.com's
editor did during a 4 day ftp clampdown |
Editor:- November 17, 2010 -
thousands of online publishers who use the services of
NTT Verio Europe were unable to
update the content on their web sites for more than 4 days recently - due to an
ftp clampdown in shared servers which use FreeBSD (a form of Unix).
As
one of those affected - Zsolt Kerekes - the editor of StorageSearch.com - first
noticed the problem on the morning of Saturday (Nov 13).
"I've
been an online publisher since 1996 - and over a period of years moved all my
sites to what I considered to be the most stable hosting platform in the
industry. In over 14 years the longest technical outage I've experienced -
where I was unable to change what readers saw on my site was just a few hours.
Being unable to post new articles to my readers was driving me nuts."
"You
can imagine how frustrating it has been to have this ftp problem with my NTT
hosted sites" said Zsolt Kerekes. "But I also knew - that switching
to another ISP could start its own set of problems. The NTT Verio Europe
websites have been stable under heavy load conditions and had good uptime for
over ten years. The recent ftp problem has only affected a small percentage of
the thousands of articles which my readers have seen this week. It's been a
huge problem for me - but most readers probably haven't noticed yet."
What
does an online editor do in that situation? And how does he/she deal with the
problem?
"I started a blog -
http://zsoltkerekes.blogspot.com/2010/11/my-ftp-died.html
"
StorageSearch.com (which had over 1 million readers worldwide in
2009) was first published in 1998 to defragment the enterprise storage
market - which at one time included more than 50 vertical segments such as RAID
systems, tape libraries, optical storage, fibre-channel etc.
In 2003
StorageSearch.com changed its focus to igniting and accelerating the solid
state storage market for SSDs - which until that time had been a niche segment
with about twenty vendors. At that time StorageSearch.com created a market
penetration model which showed that SSDs had the potential to become a ten
billion dollar a year market. Company founders and start-ups in the SSD market
liked what they saw in the model and scaled up their plans accordingly -
resulting in the developments we're seeing in the market today.
Analysts
will look back on 2010 as - "Year 1 of the SSD Market Bubble." -
according to an article published last year
www.storagesearch.com/ssd-bubble.html
Looking ahead Zsolt Kerekes has also published a roadmap to the Petabyte SSD -
www.storagesearch.com/ssd-petabyte.html
and predicts that SSDs will grow to be a $100 billion market by the end of
2019 - as SSDs replace CPUs and hard disk drives as the central foundations in
the data driven factories of the future. | | |
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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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