| Xiotech
says only 9% of server users already use or are currently evaluating SSDs |
Editor:- January 31, 2011 -
Xiotech is the
latest company to join the crowding
SSD ASAP market with
the
launch
of its Hybrid ISE - a
3U FC rack with
14TB of capacity and 60,000
IOPS
performance which internally uses a mixture of
2.5" SSDs and
HDDs.
Similarly
to many other ASAP vendors - Xiotech claims its systems has "fully
automated set-and-forget simplicity". The company says that using ROI
calculations from weighted I/O counts, automated tiering begins within 1 minute
of I/O and continues to manage the performance requirements of applications in
real-time.
Editor's comments:- in its
Jan
2011 blog - Xiotech disclosed that a customer survey it had done about SSD
usage revealed "only
9% in-use or currently evaluating the use of SSD.
Another 8%
responded that SSDs were in 2011 plans. Of those who've adopted/currently
testing SSDs, over half were using SSDs as part of a storage array. Less that
25% were deploying memory cards added to servers."
Those figures indicate the
huge upside
which still remains for the SSD market.
See also:-
Can you
trust SSD market data?,
Ratio of SSD capacity
- server vs SAN
companies you can trust to speed your SandForce SSD to market
Editor:-
January 31, 2011 - SandForce
has started a directory of companies, tools, technologies and services to
help SSD designers integrate its
SSD processors and get
them to market more quickly.
Each member company in the new
SandForce
Trusted™ program ensures that their products and/or services fully
support SandForce SSD Processors and provides response to SandForce customer
inquiries within 24 hours while committing to high-priority support for fastest
problem resolution.
Editor's comments:- 6 out of the 7 initial
companies in the new program provide
test / design verification
products.
See also:-
Branding Strategies
in the SSD Market
Thousands of SSD users have chosen Fusion-io
Editor:-
January 26, 2011 - Fusion-io
recently
announced
that in the past 12 months it has shipped more than 15 petabytes of its
enterprise flash SSD accelerators.
To put this into context -
EMC said it had shipped 10
petabytes of SSD storage in 2010.
Fusion-io says that more than 2,000
end users have chosen to architect their enterprise infrastructure upgrades with
Fusion's ioMemory technology, including more than half of the Fortune 50.
"With
100x the capacity density of
DRAM and less expensive on
a per gigabyte basis, NAND
Flash stands to solve the fundamental data supply problem that has led to 20
percent or lower average processor utilization, even in the face of
virtualization," said David
Flynn, CEO of Fusion-io. "By integrating flash directly into
servers using memory controller methodologies and virtual memory management
techniques, ioMemory and the Fusion-io Virtual Storage Layer (VSL) make it
possible for even large data sets to be housed effectively in memory. As
applications can then utilize the full processing potential of the server,
workloads can often be increased by 5x or more."
Editor's
comments:- if you're surprised by what this says about the
enterprise SSD
market, the role of PCIe
SSDs within that market and what this says about the
position of Fusion-io
- then you probably haven't been a regular reader of StorageSearch.com in the
past year or so. You can catch up with
recent SSD
history here.
Inside Texas Memory Systems' 8GB/s FC SSD
Editor:-
January 26, 2011 - Texas
Memory Systems today announced the availability of 8Gbps fibre-channel
interfaces for its
RamSan-630 - fast 10TB
3U rackmount SLC
SSDs.
Each unit can be configured with upto 10 independent 8Gb FC
ports for a total data transfer rate of 8 GBytes / sec. Ports can be mixed -
with the previously available (and 25% faster)
InfiniBand.
Editor's
comments:- prior to the launch I interviewed Jamon Bowen,
Director of Sales Engineering for TMS - and learned a lot about the internals
of this SSD which the company has never revealed
before. You can learn what I discovered and why the company is disclosing
this type of architectural information now - after 30+ years of SSD design
secrecy in my article -
key performance
enablers inside the RamSan-630.
George Crump briefs on Dataram's ASAP
Editor:-
January 26, 2011 - George
Crump founder of Storage
Switzerland published a
briefing
note about - Dataram's XcelaSAN .
Among other things - he says "The
XcelaSAN simply makes your current storage system go faster (by as much as 24X)
and you don't have to learn new tools or data protection strategies." ...read
the article
Seagate paper suggests HDD market is unassailable by SSDs
Editor:-
January 24, 2011 - Seagate
has published a
point of
view document (pdf) which is designed to show that the position of the hard
disk market is unassailable in the notebook market - no matter what happens in
the next few years with SSDs. I discuss the implications of this in an article
which shows the flaws
in Seagate's analysis of SSD market size constraints.
the future of data storage
Editor:- January 23, 2011
-
the
future of data storage is the lofty sounding but aptly chosen title of a
new article published online today in Broadcast Engineering -
written by Zsolt
Kerekes editor of StorageSearch.com
(that's me).
It's a completely new article which synthesizes and
integrates concepts from several futuristic articles which have already
appeared here on the mouse site and wraps them into a cohesive whole. Anyone
who reads it will get a clear idea of where the incremental changes they read
about in storage news pages (like this one) are likely to end up. ...read
the article
SSD ASAPs will still be needed after hard drives have gone
Editor:-
January 21, 2011 - today a reader asked a good question about the
SSD ASAP market -
effectively asking if I thought some vendors might have missed an opportunity
here - because of
how long it
was taking to get customers to accept them.
When the first ASAPs
came to market in 2009
- I commented that the clock was ticking - because I didn't see the need for
this type of product once enterprises transitioned to a pure SSD environment in
the dataceneter.
I was glad to get the email because I have revised my
thoughts about this. Here's the text below from the reply I sent this morning.
I've
been revising and updating my long range SSD market model recently - some parts
of which appeared in this article last year
http://www.storagesearch.com/ssd-petabyte.html
Something which comes out of filling in the details is that I was wrong
to say that SSD ASAPs will have a limited market life. When the datacenter
transitions to a 100% solid state storage in the 2015 to 2019 period - there
will be an even bigger need for automatic tiering technology between the 3
levels of SSDs in the new storage architecture described in the petabyte SSD
article.
That's because the difference in latency between the fastest
SSDs and the slowest (bulk storage SSDs) will be bigger than the ratio between
hard drives and cartridges in a
tape library. That means
the best performing ASAPs will still find a place in the market - long after I
originally expected.
I initially thought the need would disappear in
an environment which was 100% solid state storage. In some apps that will be
true. But in bigger enterprises economic realities mean that tiering - between
different classes of SSD storage - will still be necessary.
To see how all these pieces will fit together take a look at my later
article - an introduction
to enterprise SSD silos
SandForce dedupes inside the SSD
Editor:- January
19, 2011 - Did you know that SandForce's SSD
controllers
do
compression and dedupe as some of the tactics to manage
flash endurance?
I suspected it - because some other designs do it too - but I wasn't
sure.
In the case of SandForce this design approach was confirmed
in
an
article published recently in Electronic Design.
Fusion-io names channel partner in Japan
Editor:-
January 18, 2011 - Fusion-io's
complete SSD product line will be available to oems, integrators and end users
in Japan as part of a new agreement
announced
with Tokyo Electron Device.
See also:-
Storage Resellers in Japan
WD has 50% of enterprise HDD market
Editor:- January
18, 2011 - Western
Digital announced the availability of its 2nd generation
WD S25 SAS drives
(2.5" 450GB 10,000 RPM).
"Over the past 3 years, SAS has
established itself as the preferred interface for
HDDs in servers and
enterprise storage systems, representing more than 50% of all HDDs
shipped for enterprise applications in 2010," said John Rydning, research
director, hard disk drives at IDC.
Editor's comments:- 11 years ago (see news story below) WD
announced its exit from the enterprise hard drive market. It re-entered the
enterprise HD market in
February 2003
with its SATA compatible Raptor.
But hard drives haven't got any
faster in
random IOPS
in the intervening period. What's happened instead is that consumer HDDs have
got more reliable -
and the differences between a consumer and enterprise HDD are much easier to
manage as an incremental value engineering process in the design. If you want
to know where the performance is in SAS drives? It's in
SAS SSDs.
why would anyone be interested in past data storage news?
Editor:-
January 17, 2011 - I published a new blog today called -
why
would anyone be interested in past data storage news?
11 years ago I
started to archive
the weekly data storage
news on StorageSearch.com.
I was slow in starting a news page and had many doubts about managing an
archive. Looking back - it's surprising what the benefits have been. ...read
the article
new edition - Top 20 SSD Companies
Editor:- January
12, 2011 - StorageSearch.com
today published the new edition of the
Top 20 SSD companies.
The
15th quarterly edition
in this popular series is based on market data for the 4th quarter of 2010.
Whether you're buying SSDs, selling them, trying to understand what's happening
in the SSD market, choosing a strategic SSD partner or want to invest in an SSD
company - this is the much anticipated short list which you can't afford to
ignore.
...read the
article
Alacritech enters SSD ASAP market
Editor:- January
11, 2011 - Alacritech
launched
the ANX
1500 ($70,000 base price) - a 2U
fat flash
SSD ASAP optimized
for the NAS market - which
the company claims can deliver 120,000 NFS OPS when configured with 48GB of
DRAM and up to 4TB flash SSD.
new report looks at NAND flash succession
Editor:-
January 11, 2011 - Forward Insights
and its research collaborators have compiled an in-depth, independent analysis
which analyzes the options for various
non volatile memory
technologies which could become viable in storage after floating gate NAND flash
hits fundamental scaling limitations
What's after
NAND? (pdf outline) is the product of experts in floating gate and charge
trap flash, and resistive and emerging memory technologies. This new report
(price $10k) evaluates 3D NAND and cross point memory concepts from Hynix,
Intel, Macronix, Micron, Samsung, SanDisk, Toshiba and Unity and concludes with
a roadmap till the end of the decade. |
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| Apps
Acceleration Guides |
Editor:- 2011 is my
company's 20th year publishing enterprise buyers guides. The problem
remains the same... How to make server apps run faster. Only the solutions have
changed (or become more affordable).
In the early 1990s there were only
a handful of SSDs listed in my directories. So what did I spend my time
researching and writing about?
In those days the big moves in apps
acceleration - which I wrote about in the
SPARC Product
Directory - were escalating CPU clock rates (which went from 40MHz to
1,000MHz in the 1990s), widening data busses for microprocessors (from 16 bits
to 64 bits in the 16 years upto 1995) , the move to multiprocessing support in
standard desktop operating systems (starting with SunOS in 1991), the seemingly
slow adoption of RAID systems
(from about 1987 to 1998), the use of optical links (in
early fibre-channel)
and ever faster parallel SCSI.
Today
the single biggest factor which will advance performance and reliability in all
segments of the computer market is solid state disks.
After
2010 -
which I christened the Start
of the SSD Bubble - SSDs are now indisputably a multi-billion market -
with the potential (I think) to grow by another order of magnitude in the next
10 years.
It's always fun (and also a serious undertaking - if you get
it wrong) to guess what the future holds.
I've finished my
List of 11
SSD market predictions for 2011 - which emerged daily in the closing
days of 2010.
In past
years these SSD market predictions have accurately anticipated the tone
of market twists and shifts.
How about other types of storage? And
other people's predictions? |
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"Thanks
for the offer, but...
we don't want to deploy any new hard drive arrays.
Not even if you're giving them to us free!" |
| This classic article described the pivotal
future storage market climate in which enterprise users will cease to regard
hard drive arrays attractive or usable - even if the cost of buying a new hard
drive array drops away to ZERO! -
this way to the
petabyte SSD | | |
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