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Web-Feet and SSDs in notebooks
Editor:-
June 21, 2012 - "Adoption of SSDs in client, commercial and enterprise
applications gained momentum in
2011 with
shipments and revenue totaling 16 million units and $4 billion respectively"
says Alan
Niebel in the exectutive summary of the latest
SSD
market report from Web-Feet Research.
He goes on to say that "SSDs in notebooks
are not expected to significantly impact and
displace HDDs in
notebook
platforms until 2015 with adoption of over 24% penetration."
Greenliant enters industrial e.MMC SSD market
Editor:-
June 20, 2012 - Greenliant
Systems today
announced
it is sampling industrial
temperature range (-40°C to +85°C )
e.MMC compatible
SSDs on a chip (14mm x
18mm 100 pin BGA) with upto 128GB capacity.
"The new e.MMC
NANDrive fills a gap in current e.MMC offerings for applications requiring high
reliability SSDs, such as automotive, industrial and networking.." said
Arthur Kroyan, VP of business development and marketing, Greenliant.
Hynix acquires DSP SSD IP company LAMD
Editor:- June
20, 2012 - SK Hynix
today
announced
it has entered into an agreement to acquire California-based storage solution
company Link_A_Media
Devices.
The reason for the acquisition should be clear enough
if you have already read the article on my home page yesterday about the new
generations of adaptive SSD
controllers.
The roadmap for
flash memory is dependent
on these technologies to enable workable SSDs. And SSDs will account for most of
the memory used in the future.
what's the role of social media in electronics design?
Editor:-
June 20, 2012 -
EE
Times is running a survey to see whether electronics engineers consider
social media useful in their work.
Skyera claims 100x gain in system level SSD endurance
Editor:-
June 19, 2012 - In a new
positioning video launched today -
Skyera's
founder Rado
Danilak claims that his company's vertically integrated technology -
which includes both a new SSD controller and supporting SSD software - achieves
effectively a 100x gain in
endurance
using new consumer grade flash. The result will be
SSD bulk storage
systems which cost less than
hard drive arrays. ...see the video
new article - adaptive flash care IP (including DSP)
Editor:-
June 19, 2012 - A few months ago I promised readers that I would publish a
tentative list of SSD companies who use what I loosely called
"adaptive
DSP technologies in SSD IP" in their new designs. .
It's one
of the most important design techniques being used in some leading flash SSDs
- in which the SSD designer can adapt the reliability, speed and power
consumption of the SSD - not based on some faw away population model of flash
chips - but optimized for the chips in each SSD - and adapting the
controller behavior to
what is measured and learned from interacting with the flash chips installed.
This is a market changing technique.
...read
the article
Virident speeds up telco billing queries
Editor:-
June 19, 2012 - That legacy
versus new dynasty thing as a way of viewing different SSD companies - is
illustrated in a quote from a customer of Virident Systems -
mentioned in a
press
release today.
"We needed to eliminate the disk-drive
bottleneck
without changing the architecture of the billing system or the customer-care
interface," said David Fruin, VP of engineering at
Vail Systems - a conferencing
technology services provider - which processes more than 48 million billing
records a day on Microsoft SQL Server.
Vail Systems improved
their response times by an order of magnitude and more than doubled their
ability to handle more customers by using Virident's
FlashMAX PCIe SSDs to
accelerate their systems "without requiring any other changes".
Editor's comments:- "SSDs
accelerate telco system" stories are as old as the hills. But what's
interesting about this example from Virident is it shows that
PCIe SSDs can do
useful work in high availability environments which are usually regarded as the
exclusive domain of SAN
based SSDs. Those PCIe
OR rackmount SSD use case distinctions aren't as rigid as some people
think.
CWCDS offers 5TB version of SANbric SSD JBOD
Editor:-
June 19, 2012 - today Curtiss-Wright
Controls Defense Solutions announced a new version of its
FC compatible SSDs the
SANbric
which supports just under 5TB and weighs about 5 lbs and is designed for
deployment in high speed rugged
data streaming apps such as on-board wide body aircraft, and helicopter
platforms.
STEC is doing better at enterprise marketing
Editor:-
June 18, 2012 - Extrapolating too far from small data samples is dangerous -
and the warnings I give about this in the monthly real-time updates to the
quarterly Top SSD
Companies List - takes up almost as much space as the list itself.
But
when - what appears to be - a small movement for a company in the top 5 end of
the list is accompanied by a narrative of significant market activities - then I
think it's worth sticking my neck out and mentioning it.
So I'm
going to say something positive about STEC - and specifically about the
way they interact with the SSD market via their routes to market and general
marketing.
Long time readers of the mouse site (as well as investors)
have for the past few years seen this company lose its way through what I
interpreted as being an outmoded way of doing business - which was suboptimum
for the enterprise SSD market. As a result of those factors (over reliance on
too small a customer base, being difficult to do business with, and being out of
touch with enterprise user adoption trends such as
PCIe SSDs) STEC's
quarterly SSD revenue approximately halved in the 2 year period from early 2010
to 2012 - at a time when the available enterprise market quadrupled.
I've
written more than enough about that in the
past and am
not going to repeat the analysis here.
What's been different about
STEC's marketing in the past few months is that the company has doing new
things which it didn't do before - rather than just doing the same old things
better.
In the past few months ads for the company's enterprise SSDs
have started to appear on various websites and the company has gotten into the
SSD software business.
And if you want users to download your software - then you have to make yourself
more approachable.
These little factors are necessary hygiene factors
for business success in today's enterprise SSD market. Although they aren't
sufficient.
My brutally harsh perspective of STEC - reflected in my
editorial and market analysis in recent years - has been that the company was
at one stage 5 years behind the curve when viewed from an enterprise SSD
marketing perspective compared to its competitors. The company survived -
because in some aspects of its flash management technology - as applicable to
enterprise SSDs - it was a few years ahead of its competitors. Although that
lead has evaporated
now.
The business steps the company has taken recently - have moved
it forward from being an electronic component biased SSD company into an
enterprise systems oriented SSD company.
SSD readers are reacting to
these differences too - and that's why STEC looks like it is nudging back up
towards the sharp end of the top SSD companies list.
5 years ago - STEC was
#1.
The
SSD market is much
more competitive now. Wherever it ends up - these search stats indicate that
STEC - competing with itself - is on a better course now than it has done for
many years. That should bode well for the company's long term future outlook
too.
Kaminario recommends you read SSD Symmetries article
Editor:-
June 15, 2012 - I accidentally discovered today that earlier this week Gareth Taube,
VP of Marketing at Kaminario
published a new blog
in which he recommends my article about
SSD Symmetries.
Gareth
says "Flexibility, such as being able to integrate multiple memory
technologies into a single box (like Kaminario's K2-H), is going to be
increasingly important to customers who want efficiency and customization
options. This is especially true because there are many memory innovations
coming on the near horizon." ...read Gareth's blog
Editor's
comments:- when I was writing the symmetry article one of the things I had in
mind to do was to put more examples in it. Then I realized that having lots of
examples would simply make the article unreadable.
One of the examples
I was going to use for good roadmap symmetry (but then forgot to put
anywhere) was in fact Kaminario - because they can leverage off whatever
Fusion-io does with
flash (or other nv memory)
and furthermore Kaminario can also leverage off whatever server makers do with
CPUs and RAM. Roadmap
symmetry is a long term consideration - important for big users who don't like
supplier churn and important for
VCs and investors too.
...Later:-
I'm glad I wrote that bit about "roadmap symmetry" - because by a
spooky coincidence - 3 days later we got the news that Kaminario's investors
still love what they do.
June 18, 2012 - Kaminario today
announced
it has secured a $25 million series D round of funding, bringing its total
funding to $65 million.
does ReRAM have role in hybrid enterprise SSDs?
Editor:-
June 15, 2012 - A research group led by Professor Ken Takeuchi
at Chuo University in Japan has published results of using
ReRAM in a hybrid design
with flash which can reduce power consumption by an order of magnitude and
increase the operating life by 7x according to -an article
in Nikkeibp.co.jp. The research is looking at implications for enterprise
SSD designs.
See also:-
SSD controllers,
RAM flash cache
ratios, hybrid
SSDs
SSDs and USB 3
Editor:- June 13, 2012 -Does
my NAND flash need USB 3.0? - is a good summary of the value that
USB 3 can bring to the SSD
market - written by Eric Huang, at
Synopsys
Nutanix has a new NFS for PCIe SSD accelerated CPUs
Editor:-
June 12, 2012 - Nutanix
today
announced
the general availability of NDFS (Nutanix Distributed File System), a bold new
distributed filesystem that has been optimized to leverage localized low
latency PCIe SSDs such
as those from Fusion-io.
By
shifting the NFS datapath away from the network directly onto the VMware vSphere
host, NDFS bypasses network communications that have historically been fraught
with multiple high-latency hops between top-of-rack and end-of-row switches.
Nutanix accelerates both read and writes for any workload.
Redundancy and
availability are achieved by data mirroring across high-speed 10GbE
switches. Nutanix says it harnesses the same distributed system techniques
that power webscale clouds such as Google, Amazon, and LinkedIn clouds into an
enterprise-friendly package that starts out as a high-density 2U datacenter
rack.
Editor's comments:- Nutanix is in the
SSD ASAP market -
with CPU-SSD
equivalency architecture integrated in the OS. The company says their
architecture "collapses compute and storage into a single tier." You
can get the general idea from their
blog and
video.
LAMD launches 90K IOPS SATA SSD controller
Editor:-
June 11, 2012 -Link_A_Media
Devices today
launched
a fast new
SSD controller aimed
at the SATA SSD market.
The
LM87800 can deliver 90K sustained random
R/W IOPS and
550 MB/s sustained sequential throughput using a 6Gb/s
SATA host interface.
The company says its eBoost SSD technology uses proprietary adaptive
DSP techniques coupled with powerful on-the-fly error correction technology.
With 8 NAND channels supporting the high-speed ONFi 2.3 and Toggle 1
flash interfaces, the LM87800 can access up to 1TB of commodity NAND flash while
also cost-effectively supporting lower capacities.
OCZ interview on DigiTimes
Editor:- June 8, 2012 -
If you've ever wondered what's the main difference between OCZ's enterprise and
consumer SSDs, and why the company has so many models - you'll see these
questions (and more) answered by OCZ's CMO, Alex Mei, in a
recent interview
in DigiTimes. | |
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