Factors in sustaining write
IOPS in PCIe SSDs
Editor:- April 21, 2011 -
flash
SSD Sustained Write Performance is the subject of a new blog by Jamon Bowen -
Director of Sales Engineering at Texas Memory Systems.
Among
other things Jamon discusses why there can be an optimal ratio of
over-provisioning - and the relationship between the peak and sustained write
IOPS peorformance in the company's popular PCIe SSD - the
RamSan-20.
how fast can your SSD
run backwards?
flash SSD
capacity - the iceberg syndrome
flash SSD performance
characteristics and limitations
IO Turbine gets funding for flash SSD IOPSware
Editor:- April 19, 2011 - IO Turbine is a new
(to me) storage software
company which is designing software for
high IOPS
virtual flash SSD environments.
The company popped out of stealth
mode today and announced it has secured $7.75 million in funding led by
Lightspeed Venture Partners, as well as Merus Capital and notable angel
investors.
Editor's comments:- I don't write much about
startup software companies any more after tracking hundreds of them with
business plans which rarely went beyond the aspiration to get acquired. There's
a big reality gap between "hello world!" and GOOG.
There
haven't been many startup software companies with anything interesting to say
about the SSD market. The only other one that springs to mind is
NVELO - who announced
their intention last summer to launch an
ASAP like software
suite for the notebook
SSD market.
Their team comes from an impressive array of
heavyweight enterprise companies. I asked some basic questions about the
company's business plans today and you can see the answers in
IO Turbine's profile page.
STEC steps closer to independently marketing enterprise SSDs
Editor:-
April 19, 2011 -
STEC has
acquired a
software
company in India that virtually no one had heard of before.
"The
team of skilled software engineers from KQI has significant experience in such
areas as system software development and virtualization," said Manouch
Moshayedi, Chairman and CEO of STEC. "As the overall trend of hardware and
software convergence in the storage industry continues, it is important for us
to expand our product portfolio by creating increasingly intelligent storage
solutions that accelerate the adoption of solid-state drives in enterprise
servers. Establishing a presence in India provides us with strategic access to a
global software hub with a pool of top engineering talent to cost-effectively
meet our R&D expansion plans."
Editor's comments:- in
recent days the nature of search activity for STEC followed a pattern that I now
associate with companies which are the subjects or objects of
acquisitions.
The other company which has been spiking in search news (but not so highly) is
Violin Memory - which
recently was
named
a cool vendor by Gartner.
STEC's
acquisition looks to me like a much needed first step to a declaration of
independently marketing its own enterprise SSDs and thereby closing an
important gap in its routes to market.
Samsung exits shrinking HDD market
Editor:- April 19, 2011 - One alternative way of looking at Seagate is as one of
the world's leading storage
market analysts - when it comes to the subject of
hard drives.
In
this unsung role Seagate today published
a
report (pdf) - which among other things includes this useful total market
size info - related to the most recent quarter.
- enterprise HDD market - 13.8 million units - (up 10% year on year)
- client HDD market - 115 million units - (down 7% year on year)
The
company also
reported
that its revenue had declined 11% year on year and that it has entered
into an agreement to buy Samsung's
HDD business for $1.375 billion.
Samsung will supply NAND flash
to Seagate's SSD products (no surprise there as Samsung is a strategic
supplier to countless SSD companies already) and Seagate will supply hard
drives for Samsung's PCs and notebooks (no surprise there either as Samsung was
probably the biggest customer of its own HDDs).
Exiting the hard drive
business is a no-brainer for Samsung who within the next 5 - 9 years must
transition its entire memory business over to SSDs when the SSD market is big
enough.
I'm not sentimental about the end of hard drives - having
written enough articles about that subject already.
Robin Harris has
written a
nice article which brings the HDD oem headcount (pun intended) into
historical context.
...Later:- April 20, 2011 - Western Digital also
reported
a year on year decline in revenue for the recent quarter (15%).
So
you may well ask - what happened to the great 2011 for HDD revenue that both the
world's biggest hard disk makers were predicting not that long ago? Here's an
explanation.
"The March quarter in the hard drive industry was
impacted by 2 significant developments - the delayed supply of industry CPUs to
PC makers and the tragic events in Japan," said John Coyne, president and
CEO. "While demand for hard drives in the quarter got off to a slow start,
it later picked up as availability of CPUs improved and as fears took hold of
component shortages related to the events in Japan."
TMS announces 15% price drop in flagship SLC SSD
Editor:-
April 19, 2011 - Texas
Memory Systems today announced that new customers of its flagship
RamSan-630 (a fast
rackmount SSD)
will be the
first enterprise SSD users to benefit from the performance improvements and
greater cost efficiencies provided by a new generation of
32nm
SLC flash memory chips designed by Toshiba.
"Texas
Memory Systems continually evaluates all major
flash memory suppliers'
product offerings to determine the 'best of breed'," said
Charles Camp,
CTO at Texas Memory Systems. "The significant engineering effort put forth
to validate the devices is essential in order to guarantee our users receive the
best quality and performance from the RamSan."
The result is a
15% lowering of the system price. New pricing starts at $50K list.
Editor's
comments:- in an interview
last December TMS explained why it was sticking with
SLC rather than
MLC for the foreseeable future. And in another interview (January 2011)
which revealed performance
boosting features inside the RamSan-630 I learned that out of the many
(double digits) of SSD product generations which the company had designed
this particular family included many hallmarks of a classic product.
Today's announcement is an indication that the RamSan-630 is going to stay
around for some time.
$50k is a magic door opener for high end
mission critical enterprise SSDs. That's something which
Kaminario's CEO
Dani Golan told
me recently when they launched their K2 (a competitor to Texas Memory Systems's
RAM SSD product line). Both companies say that in addition to the traditional
large enterprises who have always bought SSDs - they're now getting business
from small new companies in the pure internet economy.
New update to Top 20 SSD Companies List
Editor:-
April 18, 2011 - today I added a new footnote to the recently published
edition (Q1 2011)
of the top 20 SSD
companies list - which answers a question I've often been asked by
marketers in SSD companies during the 4+ years that this series has been
running - "how much difference does advertising make to these lists?"
Unless
you work in sales or marketing you won't be interested in reading the new
details - because whether I include or exclude advertising data I still get
exactly the same companies in the top 10 list - just ranked in a slightly
different order.
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| the Problem with
Write IOPS in flash SSDs |
the "play it again Sam"
syndrome
Flash SSD "random write IOPS" are now similar
to "read IOPS" in many of the
fastest SSDs.
So
why are they such a poor predictor of application performance?
And
why are users still buying
RAM SSDs which cost an
order of magnitude more than SLC? (let alone
MLC) - even
when the IOPS specs look similar. |
 |
This article tells you
why the specs got faster - but the applications didn't. And why competing SSDs
with apparently identical benchmark results can perform completely
differently. ...read
the article | | | |
| . |
 |
. |
| "SSDs will change
the way computer products are designed - so that by 2015 nearly all products
will be designed to be SSD-centric - instead of HDD-centric as they have been
for over 50 years." |
| ...from -
what's the big
picture message re SSDs? | | |
. |
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