Violin says it will do $100
million enterprise SSD revenue
Editor:- June 7, 2011 - Violin Memory today
announced
a $40 Million Series C funding round - just
4 months after
the company had raised $35 Million in Series B funding.
"Our new
capital will allow us to speed up product development and global expansion in
Europe and Asia to surpass $100 million in revenue this year, the first step in
building a billion dollar company," said
Don
Basile, current CEO of Violin Memory and former chairman and CEO of
Fusion-io. "This
pace of revenue growth will continue to make Violin the fastest growing storage
company in the last decade."
Editor's comments:- the enterprise SSD accelerator market
currently offers many different approaches to escalate data driven business
performance to previously impossibly high levels. But it's
unlikely that any single
approach will dominate the market.
Instead I think that we'll
some types of problems being solved by traditional network compatible vanilla rackmount SSDs,
others by SSD ASAPs,
still others by PCIe SSDs
while at the same time an SSD fog starts to creep into hidden bastions in
traditional hard disk
storage slots - resulting in an upward performance creep throughout customer
infrastructures.
I was talking to an SSD strategist this morning who
asked me what I thought was driving this market? My answer is - it will be
competitive pressure in the end user base. If your competitors can do things
with SSDs which your customers value - then you'd better learn how to do them
too.
Whether it's running an
online catalog,
bank,
telco,
university,
game,
social
media site,
online
advertising or
entertainment
delivery service. Pretty soon it will be as necessary for enterprises to
have SSD accelerated businesses to stay competitive - as it once was to
support email and the web.
Corsair finds problems in recent 2.5" SSDs
Editor:-
June 7, 2011 - Corsair
is apparently recalling
some of its recently launched 2.5" SSDs.
The affected models are 120GB Force Series 3 units - "a
significant percentage of these drive do not perform to specifications."
Editor's
comments:- it's nearly 2 years since I wrote an article called
Why Consumers Can Expect
More Flaky Flash SSDs! - triggered by a series of recalls by (at that time)
Intel. I think my
analysis of the consumer SSD market pressures and technical factors discussed
there are still valid today. Things will get worse for several more years
before they get better.
the market makeover for industrial SSDs
Editor:-
June 6, 2011 - StorageSearch.com
today published a new article about the changing face of the industrial SSD
market.
This is a slow changing market and it rarely makes the
SSD fashionista headlines
- but many facets in the industrial SSD world have changed in the past 5
years - and it's going to be a big market too. ...read the article
Micron samples its first real PCIe SSD
Editor:- June
2, 2011 - 30 months after
pre-announcing
its intentions to enter the
PCIe SSD accelerator
market - Micron
today
announced
it is sampling the first products in a new family which will ship in the 3rd
quarter of this year.
The company says its
RealSSD
P320h drive delivers upto 750K / 341K R/W
IOPS, and
3GB/s / 2GB/s R/W throughput. It uses Micron's own 34nm SLC ONFI 2.1 NAND
flash and has on-board
RAM cache.
Micron says it manufactures most of the chips used in the new cards a
customized SSD controller.
Editor's comments:- if it lives up
to its promise - this new SSD range from Micron could be
among the fastest PCIe
SSDs around. From the viewpoint of a semiconductor memory maker - PCIe SSDs
are attractive because they have high added value. That's the theory. In
practise - to make an enterprise SSD business work you also have to invest a
lot in continuing technical design,
compatibility testing,
customer support and
marketing. The
true test of Micron's new product therefore is not so much what it's like when
it ships to users at the end of this year - but whether Micron decides to stay
the course 2 to 3 years down the road.
SandForce drives WEI to 7.9
Editor:- June 2, 2011 -
SandForce
today
announced
that a single SSD using its SF-2000 SSD Processor
along with 25nm MLC flash memory has achieved the highest possible
WEI
score of 7.9 for the disk data transfer rate in a Windows 7
environment (3.5GHz AMD CPU with 8GB 1.3GHz RAM).
The company also
announced that Kingston
Technology has joined the
SandForce
Driven SSDs group - bringing the membership upto 30 companies.
Texas Memory Systems fills gap in 1U SAN SSD market
Editor:-
June 1, 2011 - Texas
Memory Systems announced imminent availability of the
RamSan-710
- a 1U rackmount
SSD with 5TB usable SLC flash storage with 2 dual ported 8Gbps
FC ports upto 2 40Gbps
InfiniBand ports.
Throughput is quoted as 5 GB/s - although no IOPS figure was mentioned at press
time. The system includes various
reliability
options- including N+1 batteries to support orderly
shutdown
and an internal active spare flash card configuration option which provides
protection levels beyond RAID.
Editor's
comments:- there has for several years been a gap in the market for a high
performance SAN compatible
1U SSD. This is distinctly different to the segment of the 1U server market -
in which some servers are populated by
PCIe SSDs - which is
something we've heard a lot more about recently. The difference - is also
more than about accelerating infrastructure vs applications. It's what I call
the legacy vs new
dynasty SSD difference. The availability of fast - legacy compatible -
1U SSD products lowers the cost of ownership for users and provides better
granularity for incremental speedups than 2U and larger products. |
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| the 3 fastest PCIe
SSDs? |
Are you tied up in
knots trying to shortlist flash SSD accelerators ranked according to
published comparative benchmarks?
You know the sort of thing I mean -
where a magazine compares 10 SSDs or a blogger compares 2 SSDs against each
other. It would be nice to have a shortlist so that you don't have to waste too
much of your own valuable time testing unsuitable candidates wouldn't it?
StorageSearch's long running
fastest SSDs directory
typically indicates 1 main product in each form factor category but those
examples may not be compatible with your own ecosystem.
If so a
new article -
the 3 fastest PCIe
SSDs list (or is it really lists?) may help you cut that Gordian
knot. Hmm... you may be thinking that StorageSearch's editor never gives easy
answers to SSD questions if more complicated ones are available.
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But in this case you'd be
wrong. (I didn't say you'd like the answers, though.) ...read the article | | | |
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