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| leading the way to the
new storage frontier | |
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SSD
market history
the
Top SSD Companies
2012 SSD market
highlights |
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OCZ's CEO says "we've got the train back
on the track"
Editor:- November 30, 2012 - OCZ's CEO, Ralph
Schmitt -
said
yesterday in an analyst discussion reported by Reuters that the company
isn't looking to be acquired
and he doesn't think it will have any difficulties getting more cash at a
reasonable cost.
"customers want more" - says Whiptail's CEO
Editor:-
November 29, 2012 - Whiptail
today
announced
a new up-scale option for its
Invicta
(rackmount SSDs)
which will be available in the next quarter. The so-called INFINITY option
elevates the ceiling from 6 to 30 nodes and up to 360TB flash.
Dan Crain,
Whiptail's CEO said - "One clear theme that we've heard from our customers
is - we want more. What they are discovering is once they start moving their
data and applications to Whiptail, their productivity increases so much that
they want to bring all of their business critical apps to flash. It's like
eating potato chips, you can't stop with just one."
Editor's
comments:- Dan's quotable quip - connecting consumption of rackmount
SSDs to potato chips - takes me back to my 2012 preview article -
year of the enterprise SSD
goldrush - into which I've now added similar affirmatory comments
culled from other SSD news stories in the past year.
Virident ships FlashMAX II
Editor:- November 28,
2012 - Virident
Systems today
announced
the general availability and shipping of its previously unveiled
FlashMAX II - (fast
enterprise PCIe SSDs)
which support Linux, Windows, and VMware ESXi and VDI environments. Pricing
starts at $6,000.
Results from SSD IOPS needs survey
Editor:- November
28, 2012 -
How
Many IOPS Do You Really Need? - is a new 80 page SSD market report
($5,000) by Objective
Analysis and Coughlin Associates
- which the authors say - "dissects the results of a months-long on-line
survey of IT managers which collected their inputs on the IOPS, capacity, and
latency needs for a number of key enterprise applications."
See
also:- market research
"No-VC" Nimbus - story on Bloomberg
Editor:-
November 28, 2012 - Why Nimbus
Data's founder Thomas Isakovich
didn't want VC
stakeholders in his SSD company - having got frozen out from an
earlier storage venture
- is the topic in a
recent
article on Bloomberg - in which Tom also discusses the new way of
growing a business - with real customers - via the web.
Enmotus demos its SSD ASAP technology
Editor:-
November 27, 2012 - Enmotus
is demonstrating its auto-tiering software - which it calls
automated
MicroTiering technology (pdf) - for the first time in public this week at
the Server Design Summit.
5 years endurance was goal for OCZ's newest SATA SSD
Editor:-
November 27, 2012 - OCZ's
newly available, Barefoot 3 controller based, Vector
SATA
SSDs (550/530MB/s R/W throughput, 100K
read IOPS)
are rated for 20GB host writes per day for 5 years. The company
said today
- "Endurance
was a major priority in the design."
"The development of the
Indilinx Barefoot 3 controller architecture is a crowning achievement in our
company's history, being our first controller silicon and firmware completely
designed in-house from start to finish using all of the OCZ technology
development teams," said Ralph
Schmitt, CEO for OCZ Technology.
Editor's comments:-
among other things - a key difference between OCZ's new controller and
those from one time
frenemmy SandForce / LSI
is in the philosophy of
RAM cache flash
ratios.
With other things being equal - it's easier to achieve
better endurance with more RAM cache. On the other hand - not needing an
external RAM - also simplifies market access into
smaller form factor SSDs.
But as we know from the many complexities of
SSD design architecture
and IP - "other things being equal" - is a thing of the past.
update on BiTMICRO's Talino SSD controller
Editor:-
November 27, 2012 - A year after BiTMICRO
first unveiled
its quad core Talino SSD controller architecture (which is intended for use
in fast enterprise SSDs) the company is now revealing more details about
the other part of its 2 tier architecture - the ISIP (Intelligent Storage
Interconnect Platform).
"One of the innovative attributes of the
Talino architecture is its 'building block' design. A single Talino ASIC can
connect to as many as 60 ISIP chips, each connecting to up to 8 flash die,"
said Zophar
Sante, VP of Marketing and Sales, BiTMICRO - "Multiple Talino
ASICs can easily interconnect via a PCIe switch to create 1U, 2U and 3U complete
storage systems with enormous capacities and blistering performance. These
Talino based storage systems can use "off the shelf" front-end file
systems that support FC, FCoE, iSCSI, NFS, CIFS, Ethernet and can also include
volume management, virtualization and storage services software."
BiTMICRO
says the Talino ASIC is very versatile. Interface controllers are built
directly into the chip, with 8x 5Gb PCIe lanes, 2x 6Gb SAS ports and 2x 6Gb SATA
ports.
"The technology we put into our Talino Architecture puts
BiTMICRO far beyond what anyone else is doing with solid state storage,"
said Rey
Bruce, CEO, BiTMICRO. "In terms of performance, scalability, and
reliability, there's no other architecture that can match what Talino can
deliver. And we will continue the innovation of Talino so it will remain
cutting edge for years to come."
Editor's comments:- I've
arranged to talk with Rey Bruce about the thinking behind this new SSD
architecture and will publish an article about it soon.
SEC starts probing OCZ
Editor:- November 21, 2012
- OCZ
announced
it is being investigated by the SEC re financial reporting matters.
OCZ
says - "SEC has informed the OCZ that this inquiry should not be construed
as an indication that any violations of law have occurred or that the SEC has
any negative opinion of any person, entity or security."
STEC eyes large market opportunity for small SSDs
Editor:-
November 20, 2012 - STEC
today published a new blog - why
small format SSDs are better than traditional (2.5") in embedded designs.
See also:- tiny
SSDs
SSD company acquisitions in the modern era
Editor:-
November 20, 2012 - sometimes the lists and directories I maintain on StorageSearch.com become unwieldy.
One such was a list of
acquired, renamed and
gone-away storage companies - which I started in 2000 to help readers
re-establish contact with legacy suppliers which they might have lost contact
with. That list grew to over 500 companies in 10 years - which is the
point where I stopped updating it. (Nowadays other resources like Wikipedia
and social media sites can help you track down gone-away storage companies.)
What
about acquired SSD companies?
I compiled a short list of SSD
company and IP acquisitions in the modern era to illustrate my (April 2009)
article -
3 Easy Ways to Enter
the SSD Market.
For various reasons I revisited the idea of
doing an acquired SSD companies list. But I decided that rather than create an
entirely new article I'd simply update the table in that earlier article
(about entering the SSD market) - which now includes SSD company acquisitions
from January 2000 upto the present day.
I don't plan to maintain the
- SSD company acquisitions in the modern era list - beyond 500 companies - and
will probably cap it when it hits 100 or so - but I might change my mind - if
enough readers find it useful.
in memory database is even better with FIO's flash SSDs
Editor:-
November 19, 2012 - McObject
today announced that
it has run benchmarks of its
(intrinsically designed for) in-memory database systems software - with
transaction logging enabled - on a number of different devices - and in
particular Fusion-io's
ioDrive SSDs.
Editor's comments:- In a paper published 3
years ago - In-Memory Database
Systems: Myths & Facts - McObject said that fast flash SSDs used as
the storage hot spot for traditional database software could never get
performance as good as their own in-memory solution running in DRAM with legacy
hard drive array bulk storage - and various remarks in that paper sent out a
strong anti-SSD message which the company is in effect correcting today.
What
McObject is now saying - is that by using a fast low latency SSD for the "performance
draining" transaction log - you can get even greater speedups. There
are other benefits too - which arise from the efficiency of their small
footprint database - which means that a software product - which was originally
designed for the DRAM-HDD world - is a good fit in the flash SSD world too - if
you have the right scale of data and the right SSD.
SSD past, present and future
Editor:- November 16,
2012 - I was curious to see what Greg Schulz, StorageIO and Jim Handy,
Objective Analysis
might say in their iTunes compatible talk posted today -
SSD
past, present and future.
I'm glad I took the time to do so. In a
little over 15 minutes they cover a lot of history, remind you that we're
nearly 10 years past the time that
Intel once proclaimed
that flash would run out of steam. Then they discuss what might happen to
controller IP
designers if new nvm ever
replaces flash in SSDs and - to my surprise also mention me and the mouse
site. ...tune
in and listen
Samsung makes fast phone 64GB SSDs on 10nm
Editor:-
November 15, 2012 - Samsung
today
announced
they've started production of
64GB
eMMC SSDs which use 10nm flash geometry.
Aimed at the phone
and tablet market - R/W IOPS performance is 5,000 and 2,000 respectively. R/W
throughput is 260MB/s and 50MB/s.
Editor's comments:- this
shows that when Samsung see a huge enough market opportunity for a specific
range of SSDs their engineers are clever enough to design and make it. See
also:- tiny SSDs
Fusion-io's SSDs get energy saving award
Editor:-
November 15, 2012 - As well as being fast - Fusion-io is now
talking about being
green -
having
won an award from
Utah
Business Magazine. | |
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| re-imagining
the enterprise SSD customer |
by
Zsolt Kerekes,
editor - November 21, 2012
Here's one idea for SSD vendors
to start thinking about as we head into
2013...
Whether or not they are aware of the details - all SSD companies will
increasingly be judged by how snugly they fit into market segments or
application silos - where the agenda and the lines drawn around what is regarded
as a balanced set of product suitability criteria have been drawn by others.
That's
a distinct difference to how the SSD market has worked
before.
What used to happen is that users had fuzzy ideas of what SSDs were
and the benefits they might get.
The conceptual spaces for new types
of SSD products to occupy were lightly occupied and the fences were fluid.
So it was relatively easy to introduce a new product which changed
the rules of what an SSD did, how it fitted into existing setups and
how much it cost.
Now a significant proportion of SSD users realize that the "SSD"
in their lives is not a single type of SSD.
They already see many
distinctly different use cases for SSDs within the scope of what they do (this
can vary from 7 completely different SSD product types in each of the main
markets:- enterprise,
industrial,
consumer,
military etc) and
users are being bombarded with information - some of which is contradictory -
from hundreds of vendors.
How are users dealing with this?
In
the old days
of the SSD world - the traditional sales process went something like this.
SSD
vendor explains to customer -
this is what
an SSD is. This is how we do it. And these are the models we sell.
In
the modern era of
SSDs - the customer has received their
education about
what an SSD is - and what it can do - from many sources. So when they talk to a
vendor - the customer says - don't tell me about SSDs. Tell me instead how you
fit into my idea of the SSDs I'm looking for - and why I should buy
from you - instead of all these others.
Some vendors mistakenly believe that if their new SSD is really
different - but in a good way - then they can change the customer's mind about
the architecture of what they need. But if said vendors don't invest in
education via bloggers and articles on the web - they will be filtered out and
never have that face to face customer conversation.
The
SSD market is bigger
than the list of companies in the VP of sales' head, and it's bigger than
all the people who went to all the trade shows.
In many of the
discussions I've had in the past year I've got the impression that
sophisticated SSD users actually know a good deal more about what is happening
in the SSD market and what their competitive choices really look like - than
some of the marketing VPs of the SSD companies which are trying to sell to
them.
The SSD market has now grown to a scale of size and complexity
that vendors are judged and evaluated by what the mass of what other SSD
companies - and their direct competitors are doing.
And not by how
well the vendor's new product launched today performs compared to the old one
they did 6 months before (or -
it's so
pathetic but some of them still do it - how the new SSD compares to hard
drives).
And if you're reading this on your holiday... Now you can go
back to watching some relaxing
tv.
See also:-
Decloaking
hidden segments in the enterprise for rackmount SSDs | | |
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