EMC acquires XtremIO
Editor:-
May 10, 2012 - EMC
today
announced
it has acquired XtremIO
for $430
million.
Editor's comments:- XtremIO was a vendor of
rackmount SSDs
which included dedupe
and management of the storage drives in the array using proprietary array
technology which the company said was much more efficient than
RAID - while also
supporting high performance and fast
snapshots.
what would Micron do with more memory fabs?
Editor:-
May 10, 2012 - Micron
today confirmed
it is serious about acquiring Elpida's memory
business.
Editor's comments:- steel making and memory making
have some things in common - they both require big capital investments and the
businesses swing from boom to bust and back again over the decades.
But
the difference between memory and steel factories is that steelmakers can get
good utilization from assets which are more than 50 years old - whereas in the
chip world - the useful life of a wafer fab is 10x less.
Recently
Micron has been pro-actively building up its memory making resources which
indicates confiidence that they will be able to do something useful with them.
And what's the best thing you can do to add value to raw memory? You can
probably guess the right answer -
efficient SSDs
See
also:- flash and nvm,
NVDIMMs,
the SSD software
horizon (how 1TB of flash will replace 50TB of HDD)
sharpen your SSD R/W grid latency weapons to 5µS
Editor:-
May 9, 2012 - Kove
has published some
new
record latency numbers for its fast
RAM SSD - the XPD L2 -
which has achieved continuous and sustained 5 microsecond random storage read
and write when connected via 40Gb/s
InfiniBand adapters
from Mellanox .
Kove's system has good
R/W symmetry
which the company says - is not subject to periodic performance jitter or "periodicity".
Even under constantly changing disk utilization, it delivers uniform,
predictable, and deterministic performance.
"The Kove XPD L2... allows high performance applications to use
storage as a weapon rather than accept it as a handicap," said Kove's
CEO, John
Overton. "We are pleased to set a new bar height for storage
latency."
STEC still suffers from SSD revenue droop
Editor:-
May 8, 2012 - STEC
today
announced
that its revenue for the quarter ended March 31, 2012 was $50.4 million, a
decrease of 46% from $94.9 million for the year ago period.
Editor's
comments:- in Febraury
2011 - I said (and this is a verbatim quote) - "At the current rate of
progress STEC's SSD revenue - on the way down - may intersect with that of
OCZ during
2011 going
up - contrasting the fortunes of a company (STEC) which once had technical
leadership in the SSD market - with a company (OCZ) which never had technical
leadership in any SSD segment - but knows how to market and sell SSDs."
That's
exactly what did happen - but STEC's declining SSD sales can't be blamed on
OCZ - because I'm guessing they rarely talk to the same customers about the
same SSD business.
Since I made that comment 15 months ago OCZ has
made great strides to improve the strength of its IP in the controller,
software and enterprise PCIe markets - while also improving their reach into
international SSD markets.
Meanwhile - what has STEC done? It had a
gaping hole in its enterprise SSD product line for a long time (no
PCIe SSD offering) but
its weakness has always been marketing.
Newcomers to the SSD market
may even be asking - why do we talk so much about STEC at all? - given the
(small) size and (negative) direction of its SSD revenue?
It's still 1
of the top 5 companies in IP related to using
MLC for
fast-enough
enterprise SSDs and also
industrial SSDs
although I think it's debatable whether STEC is still the absolute #1
technology leader in any of those categories any more.
The company has
been a laggard at transitioning to a marketing-led rather than
technical-sales-led SSD market. Getting the marketing right in the enterprise
SSD market today can be more difficult than designing a new SSD controller.
60 seconds to make your SSDs accelerate even faster
Editor:-
May 8, 2012 - VeloBit
today
released
1.1 of its SSD caching software for Linux called HyperCache. (VMware and
Windows versions are in Beta.
Editor's comments:- I spoke to
VeloBit's CEO, Duncan
McCallum about the company and the new product.
Like many other
SSD ASAP software packages HyperCache ducks the problem of how to manage
high availability
environments by effectively only caching host reads and bypassing the caching
SSD when doing host writes.
Duncan said the software is efficient in
its use of host resources. It takes up less than 3% of host server CPU cycles
and about 2% of RAM (compared to the capacity of the attached SSD cache).
How
is VeloBit's caching software different?
In use - the company says its
content locality caching
uses the signatures of the data patterns which already are used
frequently and have lots of references in order to predict and prioritize the
caching of similar looking data. In that respect - the cache manager is
learning something which is unique to that apps environment rather than simply
caching blocks based on where they are address-wise relative to the current hot
data.
In its business model - Duncan said he wanted to make VeloBit's
software easy to adopt and install via web marketing. A design goal was to make
HyperCache capable of being installed in under 10 minutes. He said the new
launch version typically installs in under 60 seconds!
VeloBit has
tested their software with SSDs in various form factors from leading companies
including OCZ,
Fusion-io and
Virident.
Duncan
commented that when it came to
PCIe SSDs - they found
their software produced the best results with Virident - which he said
produced the fastest SSD caching results of any SSD they had yet tested.
Other
aspects of VeloBit's offering (to me) look similar to many other previous SSD
software products:- internal compression, write attenuation, real-time dedupe
and pricing on a per CPU basis.
With so many companies vying for the
same customer share of mind the thing which stands out for me is the 60 seconds
install time. Even allowing for a degree of future software bloat - the slowest
part about acquiring new SSD ASAP software could soon become typing in your
credit card details.
FIO demos 2.5" PCIe SSD
Editor:- May 3, 2012 -
Fusion-io
recently
demonstrated
a 2.5" form factor PCIe SSD.
"We believe that SCSI
Express will be adopted as a leading standard for
PCIe deployments. We
look forward to collaborating with fellow
STA members and leading
SCSI experts to share
our expertise in this area...." said Gary Orenstein,
Fusion-io VP of Products.
"mixed earnings results" for flash controllers -
says DIGITIMES
Editor:- May 3, 2012 - today
a report in DIGITIMES
provides a snapshot of business activity at 5 of the 30 plus merchant market
nand flash SSD controller
IP companies.
SLC still rules in industrial SSDs
Editor:- May 3,
2012 - I've been talking this week to a reader who has been looking for high
capacity industrial 2.5" MLC SSDs for a project which - because of
where it's used - really does need the full industrial temperature range.
He
said he'd been having difficulties. Anyway I suggested he look at the
industrial SSD
directory and contact all the companies to see who did have such a product
and after a lot of work he has found some possible suppliers - but the success
rate comes out as about 20% - or 1 in 5 industrial SSD oems actually
having a useful MLC product in this category. So this is still a part of the
SSD market where SLC reigns supreme - regardless of what you hear about in
the
server and
consumer
markets. (And the other SLC SSD bastion is
military.)
I
said - I think that one of the problems in finding cheaper MLC SSDs for
industrial temperature apps is that the few companies who really have the IP to
be able to design such a product from the
controller stance -
mostly pursue bigger markets - like consumer. And even if the consumer guys
do have the controller technology for extended temperature MLC - they don't
cope well with other factors - like
surviving SSD
sudden power loss. But it's good to know that some companies can do it -
even if it's less than you would expect.
A few hours after posting the
above - I got this helfpful comment from another reader (on a different
continent)...
Peter
Kindl, Managing Director at Solid State Storage Consulting in
Germany emailed me to say -
Hi Zsolt, I'd like to comment on your
today's news "SLC still rules in industrial SSDs" and your
article about
industrial grade SSDs.
The most critical criteria for industrial clients is neither of
technological nor technical nature, but a process management topic:
industrial clients expect a true fixed
BOM management by the
supplier, in order to get exactly the same product, that they had qualified for
their system.
Fixed BOM has become a sales & marketing argument
and is being misused. Many suppliers allow "minor" changes, i. e. F/W
updates or even dye changes under their "fixed BOM" definition, which
can cause severe integration issues at the client's site.
Digging deeper into that subject, fixed BOM suddenly turns out to be
marketed the same as so called controlled BOM for certain suppliers, whose core
business is still the commercial or client SSD market.
In addition, it's my experience, having been in that market since
2005, that the typical life time expectation for SSD product is closer to 7+
years - at least with most German industrial clients (telecom, IPC and
industrial automation). And in many cases, you start the evaluation with a
current product generation, that will be almost EOL by the time the client has
finished his qualification.
Therefore, sharing the product roadmap and migration plan becomes
an important issue, in order to minimize re-qualification cost. This is also
becoming a major challenge as most Asian suppliers are hesitant to even talk
about current technological matters like NAND flash supplier and lithography
being used in the product as well as the NAND flash controller manufacturer.
The top tier industrial clients in Central Europe have a certain
expectation by history of the past 5-8 years and new comers don't seem to
understand the market requirements when they enter that market. At this year's
Embedded World in Nuremberg, Germany it became very obvious, that many new and "old"
suppliers (Kingston!?) want to get a decent piece of that tasty cake.
Best regards - and keep up the good work at storagesearch.com
$25 million C round keeps Nirvanix cloud flying
Editor:-
May 3, 2012 - Nirvanix
today
announced it has raised over $25 million in a Series C funding round -
bringing its total capital raised to $70 million.
It's
cloud stuff - so you
may not be very interested. But one interesting thing is that they say keep
self-healing replicas of customer data in multiple geo-diverse locations -
not just static DR copies - which they say improves the
data recovery
experience.
OCZ's annual SSD revenue more than doubles
Editor:-
May 2, 2012 - I'm not sure if this story rates as "SSD news" -
because in a way it was predictable - but OCZ yesterday
reported
that its SSD revenue for the year ending February 29, 2012 was $338 million -
(2.5x the company's year ago SSD revenue).
And in the most
recent quarter OCZ has averaged over 1 million dollars of SSD sales every day.
Looking
ahead:- OCZ says it expects net revenue for its fiscal year ending February 28,
2013 (FY'13) to be in the range of $630 to $700 million.
Putting
that into a
historical
context... OCZ anticipates that its own SSD revenue in the year
which has already started (FY13) will be bigger than the entire SSD market
generated in 2008
- when the size of the market passed 100 SSD companies.
OCZ
has been steadily moving up the rankings in the
top SSD companies list
too - based on search volume - here on StorageSearch.com (reaching #5 in Q1
2012, and #4 in April 2012).
TrendFocus launches new memories in SSDs report
Editor:-
May 2, 2012 - have you ever wondered what percentage of a memory maker's SSD
output is SLC or MLC or TLC? and other things like that?
TrendFocus
has launched a new NAND/SSD Information Service which includes that kind of
data. The company says that the SSD section of the report will include client
and enterprise SSD memory shipments and forecasts.
HGST claims first demonstration of 2x faster SAS SSD
Editor:-
May 1, 2012 - HGST
today
announced
successful demonstrations of the industry's first 12Gb/s
SAS SSD.
"We
have successfully achieved interoperability between our 12Gb/s SAS drive and
12Gb/s SAS HBAs and expanders from both
LSI and
PMC-Sierra" said
Brendan Collins, VP of product marketing, HGST.
Editor's
comments:- no great surprises here if you read the SSD performance roadmap
published here 4 years ago. The new challenge for SAS SSDs in this speed class
- will be cannibalization from hot-swap 2.5"
PCIe SSDs like those
from Micron.
no wear out yet in sight for Violin's VC flash cash
Editor:-
May 1, 2012 - Like many other SSD companies
Violin Memory is
still burning flash cash faster than it's coming in from customers - but
professional investors are still happy to fuel the flames.
The
company has increased the size of its recent series D funding round to $80
million - up from the $50 million announced a few weeks ago - to take advantage
of the high subscriber demand and has named a new strategic investor -
GE Asset Management. See
also:- VCs in SSD
RunCore offers plug-in DOM versions of tiny SATA SSD
Editor:-
May 1, 2012 - Do your interests include
tiny SSDs? |
