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LSI ships 1 million SandForce controllers /
month
Editor:- July 31, 2012 - LSI has announced
enhanced support for the
Ultrabook SSDs
market in its SandForce
SF-2200/2100 controllers:- enabling lower SSD power consumption, faster
boot and support for "virtually all MLC flash product families".
"LSI
has shipped well over 10 million
SandForce processors
and we anticipate our shipment volumes will continue to increase, driven by the
exploding demand and lowering price points for NAND flash technology," said
Thad Omura,
VP of marketing, Flash Components Division, LSI.
Editor's
comments:- last week I asked LSI if the power saving feature was related in
any way to adaptive
DSP care. I haven't got an answer yet - so it may be the answer is No.
On the other hand maybe they're waiting for the
Flash Memory Summit (in 3 weeks
time) before they say more about their adaptive write DSP IP roadmap.
LSI/SandForce
have shipped over 10 million SSD controllers - since
2010 - and
they're currently shipping over 1 million per month.
Seagate names new VP SSD
Editor:- July 30, 2012 -
After 6 years at other companies Gary Gentry
has rejoined Seagate
to lead its SSD business as senior VP SSD.
He was recently GM
of the Enterprise SSD Division at
Micron.
Editor's
comments:- If you want to see what I've said recently about these 2
companies - from the angle of the SSD market - just click on their profiles.
There are many possible interpretations of what this (and other recent
rumors) may mean. The simplest is that Seagate is taking the enterprise SSD
market more seriously.
new blog - the Survive and Thrive Guide to Enterprise SSDs
Editor:-
July 30, 2012 - I've already written and researched many different types of
guides to the enterprise SSD market. Is it possible to say everything important
in 1 set of bullet points? Maybe.... You can see the result in my new blog
today -
Enterprise
SSDs - Survive and Thrive Guide.
some VCs like their storage startups Nimble and Pure
Editor:-
July 27, 2012 - In a recent
article
on BusinessInsider.com a bunch of VCs named 2 SSD companies among
their list of the Next 25 Big Enterprise Startups - the companies being - Nimble Storage, and
Pure Storage.
It's
nice if your mother or your VC likes you. An old friend of mine, Ross King, used to
classify the way that most
VCs prefer to do
their market research
as BOGSAT - because VCs don't like to waste money and think they know market
trends better than a bunch of desk / trade-show research monkeys.
If
and when either of these SSD companies gets enough of your attention they might
get into a more
significant similar sized list.
intrinsic temperature related data rot in flash SSDs... a new
blog by WD
Editor:- July 26, 2012 - Back in February 2009 - on
this very page - I started talking about the Jekyll & Hyde personality of
flash SSDs - specifically in the context of Data Remanence vs Permanence.
What
I meant was that the
apps use case is
what determines whether an intrinsic physical attribute is good or bad.
Retaining
stored data is a bad thing in a
military SSD when the
SSD could fall into enemy hands. That's why we have
fast-purge SSDs.
Retaining
stored data is a good thing in an always powered enterprise SSD array - and
you may have thought that maintaining this aspect of
data integrity
in so called "non-volatile" memory like flash was a
no-brainer.
But enterprise SSD designers have long known that they
can't rely on physics alone. That's why you have "healing cycles"
which pro-actively work their way through the flash array to repair data rot -
which otherwise would accumulate and become irrecoverable.
One of the
seldom advertised beneficial side effects of pro-active
endurance
management cycles BTW is that they suck up data from unworn out blocks
- which from an apps view haven't changed and are "at rest" - and
while shunting that data into a less new physical location - also detect and
correct silent errors.
Intuitively users know that temperature comes
into this somewhere too. But how fast (if left to itself) does flash data rot at
different temperatures?
These factors affect every user of SSDs - but
industrial SSD users are most at risk - because the period of operating
temperature stress is longer than in other markets - and embedded industrial
SSDs can't afford the type of
high availability
architectures of the enterprise world.
A good analysis of temperature
affects on flash data integrity can be seen in a recent blog - about
intrinsic
temperature related data rot in flash SSDs - by Eli Tiomkin,
Director, Business Development,
WD Solid State Storage
who says (among other things) - "Over time, NAND cells may lose enough
charge and flip enough bits to overwhelm the ECC capability of the drive
controller and cause data loss."
Eli Tiomkin's useful table lets
you look up the SSD storage temperature and see how much more quickly the
native flash will corrupt - if a suitable
controller or healing
process isn't in place to detect changes and fix them....read
the article
Another $25 million funding for Tintri
Editor:- July
24, 2012 - hybrid NAS rackmount
SSD ASAP maker Tintri today
announced
it has closed a $25 million funding round which brings the company's total
capital raised to over $60 million.
Booting up a dialog about the future of PCIe SSDs
Editor:-
July 24, 2012 - You can see how an anticipated 45 second dialog with Texas Memory Systems
about bootable PCIe SSDs turned into a 45 minutes discussion
about
the future of the PCIe SSD market in a new article extracted from the
SSD news page today. ...read
the article
AutoCache for PCIe SSDs
Editor:- July 23, 2012 -
Proximal Data
announced
immediate availability of its first product - a
software based
SSD ASAP - designed
to work with PCIe SSDs - in particular - products from
LSI and
Micron.
AutoCache ($999
for cache sizes less than 500GB) reduces bottlenecks in virtualized servers to
increase VM density, efficiency and performance. The company says it can
increase VM density upto 3x with absolutely no impact on IT operations.
Editor's comments:- here are some questions I asked about the
new product - and the answers I got from Rich Pappas,
Proximal's VP of sales and business development.
Editor:- How long
does it take for the algorithms to reach peak efficiency?
Pappas:- It varies by workload, but typically it takes about 15
minutes for the cache to warm to reach peak efficiency.
Editor:- Is
the caching only on reads, or is it effective on writes too?
Pappas:-
AutoCache will only cache reads, but by virtue of relieving the backend
datastore from read traffic, we have actually seen overall write performance
improvements as well. This effect is also dependent on the workload.
CRN's Top SSDs List
Editor:- July 23, 2012 - Many
publications which discuss the
consumer SSD market
seem to be devoid of any intellectual, rational or business analysis.
A good example is
CRN's
recent article - which is entitled "the 10 Coolest SSDs Of 2012 (So
Far)" - which simply lists a bunch of SSD pictures (1 on each page)
without any coherent argument given for their selection that I could see.
I
guess
CRN's
ad sales people must said to their content - we need more SSD pageviews.
If you're the one paying for those useless ads - in that null content zone - I
hope your career gets better in the future and you can put this period of
consumer tainted SSD darkness behind you.
Seagate's rumored proposal to OCZ
Editor:- July 20,
2012 - In the past few days there have been rumors flying across the web
speculating on a story that Seagate might buy
OCZ.
I
didn't mention it in these pages before - because the original valuations which
were being quoted by a site called Fudzilla.com were so low - that I didn't
give them any credence. And as I've already written a lot about both the
headlined companies recently there's nothing more I can usefully add at this
time.
Nevertheless - I know from my own conversations that every
day of the week companies which
want to improve
their positions in the SSD market - are discussing, analyzing and
evaluating possible SSD acquisitions.
When you look at the numbers of
companies involved - there are thousands of plausible pairing permutations.
And at the right price many things are possible.
I always tell wannabe
SSD company acquirers that after they have assembled their wish lists - it's
pragmatic to prioritize companies in the
Top SSD Companies list
in their shorlists.
SEC revisits 2009 SSD History in suit against STEC's CEO
Editor:-
July 19, 2012 - STEC's
Chairman and CEO Manouch
Moshayedi - is the subject of a civil action
filed by the SEC
- the company
announced
today.
The SEC says this is in connection with the timing of sales
of stock holdings in
2009.
Among
other things - SEC says about its complaint...
"STEC's stock
price increased more than 8x from January to August 2009 as the company
reported higher revenues, sales, and margins for its products, particularly its
flagship flash memory product called "ZeusIOPS". The stock rise also
came on the heels of STEC's July 2009 announcement of a unique agreement with
its largest customer,
EMC which agreed to buy
$120 million worth of ZeusIOPS in the 3rd and 4th quarter of 2009.
SEC
alledges that "Moshayedi touted the sales growth of ZeusIOPS and said the
agreement with EMC was "part of the expected growth" for STEC going
forward."
Among other things- STEC's press release says - the
Commission has notified the Company that it would not bring an enforcement
action against the company or any of its other executive officers. Also - a
spokeperson for the company expressed confidence that the allegations will be
seen to be without merit.
Editor's comments:- although this
relates to old happenings in SSD market - many investors were surprised and
annoyed when they lost money by following what they had assumed to be safe
bets in STEC's SSD outlook.
This is one of those stories where a
single letter (the difference between STEC and SEC) can make a lot of difference
to the meaning. I'm reminded of what Winston Churchill wrote in his history of
the 2nd World War. He said that when discussing the Middle East - his staff kept
mixing up Iraq and Iran. So to avoid mixups he decided for planning purposes
they should refer to Iran as "Persia".
...Later:-
SEC
dropped
the case.
Amazon offers SSD speed in the cloud
Editor:- July
19, 2012 - There are many ways SSDs can be used inside
classic cloud storage
services infrastructure:- to keep things running smoothly (even out IOPS,
speed up backups), reduce
running costs etc.
Amazon
Web Services recently launched a new high(er) IOPS instance type for
developers who explicitly want to access SSD like performance.
In
3 to 5 years time all enterprise storage infastucture will be solid state -
but due to economic necessities it will still be segmented into different types
by speed and function - as I described in my
SSD silos article -
even when it's all solid state.
I predict that when that happens -
AWS's marketers may choose to describe its lowest speed storage as "HDD
like" - even when it's SSD - in order to convey to customers what it's
about. It takes a long time for people to let go of old ideas. Remember
Virtual Tape Libraries?
Micron in volume production of 1Gb PCM
Editor:- July
18, 2012 - Micron
today
announced
it was the 1st company to be in volume production of Phase Change Memory
(PCM).
The company's 45nm memories have upto 1Gb in a multichip
package.
Editor's comments:- PCM fans will get excited about
this.
But before we get carried away on a tidal wave of PCM SSD
speculation let's recall the reason we still use flash to implement the bulk
storage capacity in nearly all SSDs (despite flash's many
defects and
complex ramifications).
It's economics.
PCM
can be viable as an alternative to battery backed
RAM in the
cache part of a
flash SSD. Some SSD oems have already done that. But PCM's storage density
is too low to replace flash in mainstream SSD applications for at least the next
3 years.
You can read more about various nvm technologies which were
going to make flash obsolete (including details of the 1st PCM PCIe SSD which
was unveiled a year ago) in my article
flash SSD's past phantom
demons
Dell launches storage VC fund
Editor:- July 17, 2012
-
A
report in CNNMoney says Dell is launching an
investment fund for early stage storage startups.
Editor's
comments:- The tranches of money on offer (3 to 5 million dollars) seem
quite small by SSD IP startup standards today - but that could buy Dell a
useful chunk of an early stage
SSD software company -
for example.
When I think of vendors who have already invested in SSD
companies Intel and
Samsung are the first
which spring to mind. See also:-
VCs in SSDs and storage.
when there's no SSD news - another benchmark record
Editor:-
July 17, 2012 - When companies don't have anything new to say about their
technology, revenue, or funding rounds - their PRs manufacture benchmark /
partner / customer success story news.
One
story
today (pdf) in this category connects Violin to Cisco in a VMware
benchmark.
There are many other "SSD news" stories I could
have inserted in this space today - if I was less discriminating - such as
an
enterprise user survey by one SSD company which doesn't say anything
worthwhile - and a new SSD
ASAP product from another company which has
a different
combination of drives in it (than the previous model).
Just
showing you I'm still awake. My real work is being done on other pages today.
Something which really is newsworthy might land on this page a little later.
new edition of the Top SSD Companies
Editor:- July
16, 2012 - 2 new companies shot straight up from stealth mode into the ranks
of the top SSD companies that readers followed up in the last quarter. The
new edition of the Top 20
SSD Companies tells you who they are - and analyzes the technology and
business stresses affecting the established SSD market leaders. ...read the article
Overland enters SSD ASAP market
Editor:- July 11,
2012 - Overland
today made its long overdue début into
SSD market
history with the
announcement
that it uses SSD
auto acceleration in its
SnapSAN
(iSCSI /
FC SAN) hybrid storage
racks to get upto 8x faster file performance. See also:-
SSD Backup,
SSD ASAPs.
OCZ reports 54% SSD revenue growth
Editor:- July 10,
2012 - OCZ today
reported
that its SSD revenue for the recent quarter (ended May 31, 2012) grew 54%
year on year to reach $106 million.
The company also said it had
achieved record bookings in this quarter of nearly $140 million.
Editor's
comments:- OCZ also moved up 1 notch in the Top SSD Companies List in Q2
2012 to its best ever position #4.
Skyera increments headcount
Editor:- July 10, 2012 -
Skyera today
announced
that 2 industry veterans have joined the company.
Dr. Alessandro Fin -
Skyera's VP of Product Management was previously VP of product development for
PNY Technologies and before
that he was director of solid state storage at
SMART.
Roy DCruz -
Skyera's VP of Array Systems comes to Skyera from iTools. Before that DCruz
was principle engineer at Brocade,
contributing to the architecture of
FCoE and storage
services. His career also spans
Nishan Systems,
Andiamo and
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