SSD news - 2011, March
22 - 31
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SSD's past phantoms
Editor:-
March 31, 2011 - a new
article published today on StorageSearch.com
discusses why the SSD
market's rock star status today owes much to 3 important past
technology phantoms which most people expected to materialize - but which
stayed behind the opera curtain. One of these "no-show" factor in
the 2000 to 2010 period was the so-called "flash SSD killer" - a
competing type of non volatile memory which might (one day) replace flash...
...read the article
StoneFly accelerates iSCSI with Fusion-io
Editor:-
March 30, 2011 -StoneFly
announced
that it will integrate Fusion-io's ioMemory
accelerators into its iSCSI
storage systems.
"By marrying our software with Fusion's cards,
we provide customers with the possibility of creating a fully scalable, high
availability, and high performance IP SAN storage system," says Mo Tahmasebi,
StoneFly's President and CEO . "We are very excited to introduce this first
of its kind breakthrough product line."
See also:-
exciting new
directions in rackmount SSDs
Web-Feet says embedded SSD revenue could reach $17 billion
Editor:-
March 29, 2011 -
Web-Feet Research
says they expect the embedded flash drive market to approach $17 billion
annual revenue in 2015.
In Web-Feet 's usage - "EFDs provide
internal storage functions in mobile, consumer and some compute applications.
They are the non-removable Flash storage positioned between Flash cards, found
in many of these same applications, and SSDs. As the EFD evolves they take on
many controller features found in the low end
SSDs."
More details about their predictions are in their annual report (130+
pages, $6,500,
outline
pdf) See also:-
SSD Market Analysts
Kaminario carves new market for RAM SSDs
Editor:-
March 28, 2011 -
Kaminario
announced immediate availability of its
K2
DRAM storage appliance a family of enterprise
FC SAN
rackmount
RAM SSDs which scales
up to 12TB and delivers 1.5 million IOPS with 16 GB/s throughput.
K2's
entry level configuration provides 500GB of storage and delivers 150,000 IOPS
with 1.6 GB/s throughput for $50,000. Kaminario's K2 has true N+1 high
availability, including mirrored storage with automatic data recovery, redundant
fibre channel connectivity and a
UPS, to
reduce the risk of losing data access.
Editor's comments:- I
spoke to
Gareth Taube,
VP of Marketing and Dani Golan
CEO about the new product and how they see Kaminario in the SSD market. We had a
wide ranging discussion about the challenges in the enterprise SSD market,
the growing new role of RAM SSDs, and how they solve the competing demands of
reliability and
speed. You can see
those details in a new article published later today.
Overall I got
the impression this is a company which really understands its market niche well
and fills an important gap in the enterprise acceleration space which is not
catered for economically by other vendors.
Re customers:- Kaminario
said most of their customers already had experience with 2 or 3 previous SSD
projects. Like all new SSD companies they like to talk about the successes
they've had with accelerating enterprise apps performance in what I call the "usual
suspects" - banks and other financial institutions - 10x speedup here, 25x
speedup there. We've heard all that stuff
before.
But Kaminario's products also match the budgets and performance needs
of smaller companies in new markets. One of their customers in this category
is
Digital Trowel which extracts data
from web sites and uses analysis and inference techniques to provide real-time
alerts and predictions about stocks, prices, news and other significant
market
developments. That's the kind of "only with an SSD" can you do
this - data factory model - I had in mind in my
petabyte SSD article
last year.
Digital Trowel 's CTO,
Anton Bar said - "Other
SSD storage had the same price, but much lower speed than the Kaminario K2 -
a clear no-brainer. The bottom line is, the K2 shortened our identity
resolution process by about 50%, and that's very important in our line of
business."
Kaminario said its sweet spot in the hot data capacity range upto
12TB which is on the SAN
and which has very high IOPS demand. Because Kaminario is unashamedly a RAM
SSD company. Their "IOPS performance" doesn't need to be
qualified by
small print and hedging statements like those of flash SSDs. And I'll be
saying more about the internal technology elsewhere. The best way to think about
their ideal customer is the department in a large enterprise.
Kaminario
said that many of their customers - having experienced the K2 - were now
acting as internal evangelists to other parts of their organizations to advise
them how to solve performance problems which had previously proved intractable
to solutions by flash SSDs (due to latency) and traditional RAM SSDs (due to the
complexities
and side effects of failover architectures).
Intel launches new improved notebook SSD
Editor:-
March 28, 2011 - Intel
launched a new 2.5"
SSD aimed at legacy
notebook
designs which have 3Gbps SATA
ports.
The
Intel
SSD 320 (which includes 128 bit encryption) is available with MLC
capacities from 40GB ($89 1k price) to 600GB ($1,069 1k). R/W speeds are
270MB/s and 220MB/s respectively. R/W
IOPS are
39,500 and 23,000. In this new design , Intel has added redundancies that
will help keep user data protected, even in the
event of a
power loss.
Editor's comments:- Intel's new SSD is really
a catch up exercise with what others have already been doing in this market
using SandForce controllers.
Pricing in the low
end consumer market hasn't changed much in the past 12 months. What's changed
instead is you can get a faster product with similar capacity for about the
same price.
analyzing the alchemy in Fusion-io
Editor:- March
25, 2011 - it's rare for companies to say complimentary things about their
competitors -
but a new
blog about Fusion-io - written by Woody Hutsell
who (until a year ago) was head of Texas Memory Systems
does just that.
Woody's new article asks how did Fusion-io become
such a successful enterprise
SSD company? (Despite all his best efforts to the contrary.) ...read the
article
Foremay ships 32GB PATA disk on chip
Editor:- March
25, 2011 - Foremay
today announced it is shipping 32GB
PATA versions of its
OC177
SSD Disk on Chip which measures 22 x 22 x 1.8 mm and has R/W speeds of 70
and 40MB/s respectively.
Editor's comments:- StorageSearch's
1 inch SSD directory
lists over 30 companies which make very small SSDs.
M-Systems - pioneered
the commercial DiskOnChip market. In
2001 M-Systems'
DiskOnChip flash SSD offered 16MB capacity in a single 48-pin TSOP (Thin
Small Outline Package). By 2006, when the company was acquired by
SanDisk, the
DiskOnChip capacity had
grown to gigabytes.
OCZ joins SSD millionaire shipments club
Editor:-
March 24, 2011 - OCZ
today
announced it
has shipped its 1 millionth SSD.
Editor's comments:- a year ago
WD revealed it
had already shipped over 4 million of its SiliconDrive SSDs.
It's
comforting to know that millions of SSD readers aren't just browsing web pages -
but many of them have been engaged in serious economic activities related to
solid state storage.
When you add all these little bits together they
make a market. And
when you're trying to predict who the leading companies in the future SSD market
are going to be then it's handy to look at our quarterly
top SSD companies list
which started 4 years ago when there were only 55 companies making SSDs
instead of 300 today. Who's got the time to find, analyze and comment on so
many SSD companies? That's when the
mice come in useful. |
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