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Kaminario's systems today are mostly flash
Editor:-
February 7, 2012 - Here's an update on the long running
RAM versus flash
transition in enterprise SSD accelerators.
It's about 20 months
since Kaminario
entered the SSD market as a new name in the RAM SSD market - and just 6 months
since the company also started offering flash - as a hybrid or pure alternative
- based on PCIe SSDs from Fusion-io.
Yesterday
I asked Kaminario's VP of marketing - Gareth Taube
how's the flash thing going? And can you tell me and my readers what
proportion of recent system shipments are flash rather than RAM.
He
told me - "I would say we are running about 45% all flash arrays, 45%
Hybrids (but the hybrids are mostly Flash with 10% DRAM) and about 10% all DRAM.
At least that is the way it has been running in the last 2 quarters."
See
also:- sugaring
flash for the enterprise - how the enterprise adoption of flash changed in
the first decade of enterprise flash arrays.
Intel's fastest SSD uses SandForce inside
Editor:-
February 6, 2012 - Intel
today
announced
it has used SandForce
controllers for the first time in its new (and fastest) SATA 3 2.5"
SSD - the
Intel
SSD 520 - which (with upto 80K R/W IOPS peak - 4KB) is aimed at gaming, CAD
and graphics content creation markets. Price- based on 1,000-unit quantities
is - 60GB for $149, 120GB at $229, 180GB at $369, 240GB at $509 and 480GB at
$999.
"We worked closely with Intel to leverage their deep
understanding of the NAND flash, ultimately providing a unique and optimized
solution for client computing applications with the LSI SandForce Flash Storage
Processor," said Michael Raam, VP and GM of LSI's Flash Components
Division.
Rambus aims at replacement technology for flash SSDs
Editor:-
February 6, 2012 -Rambus
today announced
it has acquired Unity
Semiconductor for an aggregate of $35 million in cash.
As
part of this acquisition, the Unity team members have joined Rambus to continue
developing innovations and solutions for next-generation
non-volatile
memory.
With 9 years of development history, Unity's memory
technology, CMOx, has been
designed to accelerate the commercialization of the Terabit generation of
non-volatile memories. Unity expects that devices using CMOx cell technology
will (one day)
achieve higher density, faster performance, lower manufacturing costs and
greater data
reliability than NAND Flash.
"At Rambus, we are creating
disruptive technologies to enable future electronic products," said Sharon Holt,
senior VP and GMof the Semiconductor Business Group at Rambus. "With the
addition of Unity, we can develop non-volatile memory solutions that will
advance semiconductor scaling beyond the limits of today's NAND technology. This
will enable new memory architectures that help meet ever-increasing consumer
demands."
Editor's comments:- Unity's CMOx - is one of the
many alternative non volatile memory technologies which have been camping
outside the gates of the flash SSD castle for the past 10 years or more - saying
in effect to the flash insiders - please surrender (or preferably give up the
ghost) - because we'd like to take your place.
If it wasn't so
serious - billions of dollars have been
sunk in the
"kill-flash"
camp sites - you might think you were watching a scene from
Spamalot.
The
flash technologists look down on the besieging efforts and effectively say "I
fart in your general direction".
The castle walls keep getting
stronger and the flash people inside the castle - who were supposed to be dead
years ago - are counting their riches and having the world's best chefs and food
flown in daily by chopper - which the wouldbe flash terminators can only throw
stones at.
I've been observing and making judgements on nv memory
technologies ever since the first such technologies appeared appeared in
silicon. It's much longer than you think - and predates flash itself.
I
wrote an article about this - last year called
3 things that could have
killed flash SSDs.
Does the intervention of Rambus change things?
Well
it's good news for CMOx - because this technology gets another lease on life
and a leg up to access markets more easily if the comparisons ever look
competitive.
But as all the other wannabe nvRAM developers know - to
their cost - when you're chasing a fast moving quarry like flash - which keeps
changing and reinventing itself - it's hard hanging on the tail lights year
after year.
EMC gets around to PCIe SSD launch
Editor:-
February 6, 2012 - EMC
today launched
its new PCIe SSD based product line - which as widely reported last month -
leverages hardware designed by LSI.
As
you'd expect - EMC say they plan to do a lot of things to support this with
their wrap around software protection (high availability, data integrity,
reliability, and disaster recovery) and
auto tiering / SSD ASAP.
And in the future they're going to do things even faster. Nothing to get
excited about then - unless you are a supplier to EMC.
EMC would like
to suggest that it was the first company to offer flash SSDs in an enterprise
storage array Their press release said - "VFCache is the latest in a line
of enterprise flash innovation firsts, beginning in 2008 when EMC was the first
to integrate flash drives into an enterprise storage array."
That's
an idiosyncratic reinterpretation of
SSD history.
In the interests of accuracy I would rewrite that to say - "EMC was
the 1st company to ship lonely flash drives in an EMC branded enterprise
storage array (which consisted mostly of hard drives)."
losers
from this?
I guess you can count
STEC as a loser -
because having been EMC's original flash SSD supplier (in other form factors)
they may have had some hopes that their late-to-market new PCIe SSD might get
its tires kicked.
I'm only saying this - because otherwise I'll get a
load of emails asking what I think - but in my view it would be a mistake to
count Fusion-io as a
loser in this.
FIO is the company which did most to establish PCIe
SSDs as a recognized and disruptive force in the enterprise market - and a year
ago upset EMC by disclosing it had shipped significantly more of its fast
ioDrive flash SSD capacity into the enterprise than EMC had done with its slower
STEC kind - despite EMC having had the prior advantage of a legacy tied
customer base.
I heard recently from someone who is no longer with the
company - that as you might expect for a fledgling company developing oem
opportunities - many years ago Fusion-io offered its PCIe SSDs as an oem
platform to EMC. Apparently EMC evaluated the ioDrive and poked around the
issue for months - but EMC was - at that time - "clueless" about the
potential of the SSD market couldn't understand what to do with it.
SSD talk with the founder and CEO of Nimbus
Editor:-
February 2, 2012 - I had an interesting discussion about the enterprise SSD
market yesterday with Thomas Isakovich,
CEO and founder of Nimbus
Data Systems which recently launched its first high availability SAN
SSDs. ...rea d the
article
SSD rack FAQs you shouldn't have to struggle to answer
Editor:-
February 1, 2012 -
what do you need to know about any new
rackmount SSD? - is a new article published today on our home page.
StorageSearch.com's readership grew 28%
Editor:-
February 1, 2012 - I was pleased to see that the readership here on StorageSearch.com
grew 28% in January compared to a year ago.
Now you may
think that's not so great when the
SSD market is
growing so fast. But I'm more interested in quality than quantity. In the
quantitive SSD bucket - there are thousands of other sites and blogs talking
about SSDs so there's a lot of competition out there for your precious time.
One good thing about this mass of other "out there" SSD
content though is it means I can spend more of my time on SSD thought
leadership issues. Because like most of you - I'm seriously interested in
thinking about and helping to steer the SSD market's direction - so it gets
to somewhere better, faster while minimizing the bumps.
If you want to
read SSD RSS feeds masquerading as SSD headline news - such as for example -
the 45th company which has launched a 2.5" SSD which uses
brand X's
controller (unless it's Intel),
or a consumer SSD maker's
Nth annual SSD firmware
recall, or some
throwback
enterprise SSD marketer gushing about their rackmount SSD being so much
faster than a room full of 15K whirligigs - all very important things no doubt
for the companies involved - then you can read about those elsewhere.
You'd
be surprised how many editors of other SSD magazines read the mouse site too.
But we all have different goals and reader demographics. Here - since the 1990s
- it's always been about leading the way to the new storage frontier.
Thanks for your participation in helping to make the SSD market better. | |
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billions of dollars have been sunk into the "kill-flash" camp
sites - you might think you were watching a scene from Spamalot.
editor's comments in news below that Rambus had acquired Unity
Semiconductor (February 6, 2012) |
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| "Since the
early 1970s there have been 3 revolutionary disruptive influences in the
electronics and computing markets:- the microprocessor, the commercialization of
the internet and the transition of digital storage to SSDs." |
| Perspectives - on the
SSD market | | |
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| How big was the
thinking in this SSD's design? |
Does size really does matter in SSD
design?
By that I mean how big was the mental map? - not how many
inches wide is the SSD.
The novel and the short story both have their
place in literature and the pages look exactly the same. But you know from
experience which works best in different situations and why.
When
it comes to SSDs - Big versus Small SSD architecture - is something which was
in the designer's mind. Even if they didn't think about it that way at the time.
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For designers, integrators,
end users and investors alike - understanding what follows from these simple
choices predicts a lot of important consequences. ...read the article | | | |
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