|
|
| . |
Amplidata gets $8 million C funding for -
(don't call it RAID)
Editor:- February 29, 2012 - apparently you can still raise
VC funding for
HDD based storage array
companies.
Amplidata
today said it got
$8
million in a Series C round of funding for its multi-petabyte scalable,
efficiently data protecting and healing
BitDynamics technology.
The
idea is to implement the cheapest possible and easily expandable bulk
storage capacity - what they call
unbreakable
object storage for petabyte-scale unstructured data (pdf) - so the storage
nodes are stuffed with low power hard drives. But the controller racks can be
internally accelerated by SSDs.
Greenliant ships industrial secure SATA NANDrives
Editor:-
February 28, 2012 - Greenliant
Systems has
started
volume shipments of its
industrial grade
rugged SATA SLC
SSDs on a chip (BGA -
14mm x 24mm x 1.95mm) -
NANDrive
GLS85LS - which have upto 8GB capacity, 70/60MB/s R/W, include zoneable
password security and
fast erase, and
strong power fail data
protection.
"The SATA NANDrive GLS85LS product family is
backward compatible with the same pin-out across all capacities and temperature
ranges - commercial and industrial - giving customers added flexibility when
using solid state storage in their designs," said Nobu Higuchi, VP
of application engineering and product marketing, Greenliant Systems.
Editor's
comments:- I never understood before where the "Green" part
in the company's name came from - but it makes sense now - if they're offering a
stable chip footpprint across multiple flash generations.
Greenliant
is 1 of over 30 companies in the
tiny SSDs directory.
It's surprising how many
applications are now viable for tiny SSDs.
The Disk on a Chip
product concept goes back
a long way...
In 1995 - EDN magazine
cited DiskOnChip as 1994's most innovative product for embedded systems. In
those days it provided 1 to 2 Mbytes of data storage.
Commenting on the
(1995) award - Dana
Gross, president of
M-Systems said - "DiskOnChip
represents the innovation and efficiency of M-Systems' technology. This
award-winning product has found applications in embedded computer systems, where
it provides a highly reliable solution for designs faced with space and power
consumption constraints."
STEC reports continuing decline in SSD market share
Editor:-
February 28, 2012 - STEC
today
announced
its financial results for the 4th quarter and full-year ended December 31,
2011.
Revenue for Q4 2011 was $58.1 million, a decrease of 38% from
the year ago quarter and a decrease of 20% from Q3 2011. Revenue for
full-year 2011 was $308 million, an increase of 10% compared to 2010.
"As
we reported last quarter, our business remains in a relatively stable pattern as
we continue to qualify our new products with customers," said Manouch
Moshayedi, STEC's Chairman and CEO. "We are encouraged by the signs of
the market growth for enterprise SSDs and by the specific feedback we are
getting from our early customer engagements around our new products. ...While
we acknowledge that competitive challenges persist, we are confident in the
robustness of our solutions and in our abilities to innovate to meet our
customers' needs. We are still anticipating that many of our customers will
complete their qualification of our (new) products by the end of the 2nd
quarter of 2012. However, until qualifications are completed, we cannot
accurately project what the sell-through of these products will be."
TMS packs 24TB fastest HA eMLC in 1U
Editor:-
February 28, 2012 - I was just getting used to getting the measure of how much
enterprise flash capacity can fit into 1U rackspace - when Texas Memory Systems
changed things yet again by doing even more.
TMS today
announced a 24TB
high availability
system called the
RamSan-820.
This has similar internal architecture to their 720 which
I discussed with
their CEO Holly Frost last December - but it uses
eMLC instead of
SLC - hence the doubling of the storage density.
TMS today revealed
more about the internal features of their proprietary rackmount SSDs. Their
RamSan-OS has been in continuous development for over 5 years, initially
shipping with the RamSan-500
flash SSD in 2007.
The RamSan-OS is designed from the ground up to run on a cluster of CPU
nodes and FPGAs distributed throughout the RamSan systems.
Speed
is still a core differentiator from TMS.
"Many of our competitors
claim they are software companies and that their products are Application
Accelerators. While this may be fundamentally true, all TMS products are 2x
faster than any other Application Accelerators shipping today,"
according to TMS CEO Holly Frost. "It comes down to very simple
technical and business questions: Why put key functions into slow software when
you can speed up these functions in fast hardware?"
Power
consumption is an important part of the
reliability budget
too - and to drive this point home - TMS say they are happy to supply
customers with a wattmeter so they can compare these new SSDs with competing
products.
NEC Hitachi Memory dream ends in Elpida bankruptcy
Editor:- February 27, 2012 - Elpida today announced
it is reorganizing under the code of the bankruptcy laws in Japan.
Editor's
comments:- The company's
press release (pdf)
relates a detailed history of problems starting in 2007 with the credit
crunch, over capacity, falling RAM prices, increasing strength of Yen etc.
The company - Japan's biggest surviving RAM maker - started out as NEC Hitachi
Memory in 1999 and changed its name to Elpida in 2000.
Elpida never got
into the SSD market. Now it looks like it never will.
A report in the
New York Times says -
"Elpida's
bankruptcy filing is the biggest ever by a Japan-based manufacturer..."
NeoMagic demos FPGA simulation of USB MagicVault controller
Editor:-
February 27, 2012 - NeoMagic
today announced
that the company is ready to demonstrate MagicVault, its USB 3.0 based UFD USB
Flash Drive Controller solution on an FPGA platform.
NeoMagic says
FPGA platform test results for the MagicVault flash drive solution indicate a
significant performance improvement over currently available products. In
addition to testing, NeoMagic is discussing MagicVault and other new products in
development with potential strategic partners and investors.
SMART sets new competitive level in STEC-class enterprise SSDs
Editor:- February 22, 2012 - when you've got a memory business
which also designs SSDs that creates hard to reconcile business tensions.
Success
in the memory market comes from caution and long term planning to enable
survival in the inevitable feast and famine memory business cycles.
Success
in the SSD market comes from...
Well it's too early to say
definititively what it comes from - but investing in your own IP and
understanding a small set of focused customer application cases better than
anyone else - is a good starting point (judging by those in the
top 10 SSD companies list)
and being prepared to do things which are different to the way that others are
already doing them may be a good plan too - (as long as you are eventually
proved right).
Several leading companies in the past, including
STEC and
OCZ, have found that the
best thing to do if you're the SSD part of a memory business is to forget about
those memories and do your own SSD thing.
The latest company to
follow this route is SMART Storage Systems
which has officially been spun out as a separate entity - it was
announced
today.
The SSD bit is the only bit of the company I've been
interested in - and probably the same goes for most of you too. So you could say
- what's changed? - apart from a few legal formalities.
Last week I
spoke to SMART's president John Scaramuzzo and
learned more about the company's new enterprise SSD controller - which is used
in their new
Optimus
Ultra (a SAS SSD)
launched today. The new controller has reliability characteristics above and
beyond the industry standard products - from
SandForce - which
SMART also uses. SMART's new SSD design - like those from
STEC - can guarantee an
industry leading level of SSD write longevity - while using low cost consumer
grade flash.
Some tier 1 storage customers have been sufficiently
impressed to qualify the new SSD family in their systems. More about SMART, and
how their new SSD was developed - in the article -
Who's who in SSD? -
SMART - (in their company profile page). | |
| . |
 |
| . |
|
|
| |
..... |
|
