|
SSD news - June 1-14,
2013 |
| ....... |
FIO's ION software enables Breakthrough
Shared Storage Performance
Editor:- June 13, 2013 - The
performance of
Fusion-io's
ION Data
Accelerator software - which you can add to its PCIe SSD cards, any
standard server and some FC adapters to roll your own SAN
rackmount SSD -
is the point of a new
blog by the company
today which celebrates recent benchmarks for
2, 4 and 8
processor HP server configuartions (pdf).
See also:-
Can you trust SSD
specs and benchmarks?
Tegile's SSD ASAPs taught this school a lesson
Editor:-
June 12, 2013 - Tegile
Systems today
published
a story about how the kids in a Colorado school still managed to learn
stuff when their big bad old HP
SAN array failed to take the VDI strain which had been anticipated from a
pilot. Whoops - who did the modelling? Anyway Tegile saved the day with some
SSDs and one of their hybrid arrays....read
the story
Editor's comments:- when you see the word "school"
in an SSD story - it signals the message "these customers didn't have much
money but they could still afford to buy our stuff." - It's a segmentation
/ value loaded marketing
keyword messaging filtering thing. Other examples like this are:-
- when Google buys some SSDs - you know these Google people are so clever -
and buy so much. They must have got it cheap....
- when a medium sized enterprise which you have never heard of before -
which makes steel parts for tractors features in a story about buying an SSD
solution...
- when a financial markets data services provider (they have nice offices)
features in an SSD story...
I'll leave you to supply those missing
dot-dot-dots yourself. Everyone has different ways of relating to these kinds
of stories (tuning in or filtering out).
OCZ's SAS SSDs in InfiniBand benchmark configuration
Editor:-
June 12, 2013 -
Mellanox
today announced
details of a benchmark demonstration it did this week showing its
FDR 56Gb/s
InfiniBand running
on Windows Server 2012 in a system which uses OCZ's
Talos 2R SSDs (2.5"
SAS SSDs) working with
LSI's
Fast
Path I/O acceleration software and RAID controllers - getting over 10GB/s
throughput to a remote file system while consuming under 5% of CPU overhead.
Super Talent launches PCIe hybrid SSD
Editor:- June
12, 2013 -
Super Talent
Technology today
launched
a new entry level (800MB/s) PCIe hybrid SSD which combines 192GB of flash with
an integrated hard drive.
The company says that their new Super Hybrid product line is "the solution
for high performance storage at a low cost."
Editor's
comments:- As "price"
is the sole reason why consumers
would want to look at this product I was surprised it wasn't mentioned in the
press release. I asked the question - and if I find out - I'll add a note here
later.
The word "enterprise" also appeared hopefully in
Super Talent's blurb about this product. But saying so - doesn't make it so.
BTW
- OCZ launched a very
similar hybrid called the RevoDrive Hybrid back in
August 2011. See
also:- hybrid
SSDs, not all
PCIe SSDs are the same
SGI's past and present SSD partners
Editor:- June 12,
2013 - When SMART
told me they would today be
announcing
that their
CloudSpeed
500 (a SATA SSD
which uses the company's own brew of
adaptive R/W
IP and is rated at 1.2 DWPD) has been certified by SGI for use in its storage
appliance platforms - they asked if I had any questions?
"Just
one" - I said. "How many of these CloudSpeeds do they think SGI
will buy in the next year?"
Which - as you may guess - SMART
declined to disclose to all the competitors among you - who will also be
reading this. But it was worth a shot. As it is - I'm left without much of a
story.
So the only interesting thing I can say is that
2
years ago SGI was offering Virident's PCIe
SSDs in its servers.
And - judging from the list in
SGI's SSD page I
think SGI have also used Stec's
3.5"
RAM SSDs in the past too. Which all goes to demonstrate what I've said
before in my enterprise
SSD article - that no single enterprise SSD (or supplier) can economically
satisfy all the needs of server customers.
Violin's new blog on PCIe vs FC SAN SSDs
Editor:-
June 11, 2013 - How much confidence do you have in the
fault tolerance
of the SSD system which you're deploying? - And how different are the
reliability costs when you scale
PCIe SSDs compared to
rackmount SSDs?
These
are some of the issues discussed in a new blog by Violin -
Flash
Memory: too Array or to Card - written by the company's CTO of Software -
Jonathan
Goldick - who warns that when you're estimating the latency
advantages between different ways of connecting SSDs - "Always be
cognizant that you may just be moving the
bottleneck
to the software."
...read
the article
Hyperstone reports controller revenue
Editor:- June
11, 2013 - Hyperstone's
parent company today
announced
that its flash controller
revenue for the recent year was approximately $18 million, an increase of 6.5%
compared to the year ago period and 46% of total group revenue.
Editor's
comments:- it's not just the millions of dolllars in
VC funding, or the
hundreds of millions when
SSD companies get acquired which will take the SSD market on to its $100
billion dollar prize in 2020. It's all those little savings in milliwatts too -
in embedded industrial SSDs from
companies you've
never heard of - doing prosaically useful stuff which isn't sexy enough to
make the SSD headlines. (There's more to SSDs than simply accelerating banks,
shops, search and music downloads.)
We're not going to sit back and wait for oems to bring us our
share of the business opportunities in the enterprise SSD market any more -
says Stec
Editor:- June 10, 2013 - The above is my paraphrase of an
open letter to shareholders
published
today by Stec
- which states the company's new business goal is to achieve a sales mix
with approximately 50% of its future enterprise SSD revenue derived
from new, non-OEM customers.
Where did the 50% come from? This is a
number which Stec says it read about - as being indicative of routes to market
- in an SSD market report
by IDC.
To
convince you that Stec can walk the new sales culture talk and is
shedding its old culture (of waiting for the next purchase order to arrive
after an oem design slot shoot-out) the company disclosed today that a
single telco (dark
matter SSD end-user) had bought over $11 million worth of SSDs from Stec
last year as part of an initial upgrade of its infrastructure - instead of
buying new systems from traditional storage suppliers. Stec says there's more to
come from this particular customer and this new (to them) approach.
Editor's
comments:- I was saying to another enterprise SSD company last week that
even though we like to think of the SSD market as being a "fast changing
market" - it can take 2-3 years for
new ideas to
take hold in a way which changes markets.
In that context what I had
in mind was new technologies. But it can take just as long for business managers
in SSD companies to realize that they have to change the way they do things.
Here are some quotes from me taken from previous editions of the
Top SSD Companies series.
In
2009 - "Stec
relies too much on market pull-through by partners who are me-too or weak in the
SSD space. Unless it invests more in its SSD branding - its business is
vulnerable to substitution and replacement by any new SSD kid on the block with
a faster SSD controller."
In
2010 - "STEC
doesn't sell enterprise SSDs directly to users, instead its route to market has
been to rely on oems to design its SSDs into their systems - and wait for the
sales ramp to happen... STEC is poorly positioned to acquire expertise about
rackmount
SSDs (an important market in which its server SSDs are deployed and compete)
- because the company doesn't supply integrated solutions."
So it
seems like Stec's management is now dedicated to the courses of action which I
told them they should follow a few years ago. Is that still the right
direction in today's SSD market? Yes - but as all SSD vendors are finding -
to succeed you still have to be the best at what you do in ways that enough
customers know about, care about and can afford. See also:-
exploring the
exciting new directions in rackmount SSDs
Whiptail offers clues to Users playing the SSD box riddle game
Editor:-
June 6, 2013 - If you've
seen or
read - The Hobbit - then
you'll be familiar with the concept of the riddle game.
Something
similar is playing out now in the enterprise flash array market.
The
setting? I forgot to mention this.
The hero - a mythical hobbit-like
creature called "User" is trapped in a high gravity well /
force-field - just outside the entrance to a cave in which are stored great
treasures. The force-field - which prevents User entering - is the legacy
from an earlier age of steam-punk computing - whose origins no-one is able to
remember. The legends say that if User can answer 3 questions correctly from
a wizard who appears at the mouth of the cave - User can get in, grab the
treasure and move on up to a higher plane of existence. Each time User answers
correctly - he can take a step forward.
The rules? There are almost
no rules
in the "SSD rackmount riddle game" - but if there were - they
might be something like this.
Before asking each question the wizard
grabs a very plain looking smooth black metal box - and disappears from sight
into the back of the cave where he carefully picks some mushrooms and then
stoops to collect some special little crystalline rocks from a corner - all
of which he tosses into the box before sealing the lid and shaking it all
up. (User can sometimes hear the rattling while he's doing it. This adds to
the nervous tension). After some more rattling and sometimes a mysterious clang
- the wizard adds a magic spell to bind it all together and reappears back at
the mouth of the cave to ask User the next question.
The SSD riddle
game has been running for a long time. Each time User gives the wrong answers -
he has to wait another year for the wizard to appear - and then restart the 3
questions again from the beginning. But on the plus side (and this is what
makes the game playable) User is alloweed to remember earlier answers.
The
1st question is... What is the box?
The 2nd questions is... What does
it do?
And the 3rd question is... What will my next box look like?
Now
a lot of Users have been successful answering the 1st question. The answer -
in case you haven't already guessed is... It's an SSD rack.
But only a
small number of Users have got as far as guessing the answer to the 2nd
question .. What does it do? That's because the wizard gets bored and changes
what he puts in the box. And sometimes he time-shares this part of the game with
another wizard. And User can't easily tell these wizards apart.
A few
Users have accidentally guessed what sounded like the right answer to
question #2 - by either asking the wizard if he could speed things up a bit? -
Or saying - Time. Give me more time.
But the enigmatic wizard doesn't
want to make this game too easy. And so for reasons known best to himself
each time he goes back to the cave is - he picks up a different assortment
of chips and mushrooms to put in the box. And just to be on the safe side -
before he shakes it all - he casts a different binding spell.
You
won't be surprised to learn that almost no-one has ever been able to guess the
correct answer to question #3 - what will my next box look like?
I've
touched before on the growing complexities of technical
segmentation in the
enterprise SSD market - and
User
concerns about roadmap
scalability.
For many real Users - the question - can you guess
what will my next box will look like? bears a striking similarity to the
unfairness of Gollum - when he says - what has it got in its pocketses -
precious?
When Users play the riddle game with enterprise SSD
vendors - it's difficult enough to win the game when the SSD wizard plays fair
and emerges from the cave with just one box and offers some helpful clues.
But in real life - there are many identical looking wizards emerging from the
same cave - and often they're carrying more than one box.
So it was
refreshing earlier this week talking to Max Riggsbee, VP of
Product Management and CMO Whiptail about the
thinking behind their vision and roadmap for their rackmount SSD product
business.
The company recently
announced
details related to 2 different products.
- A new entry level ($20K floor price) fast-enough
1U iSCSI SSD - which is
aimed at the branch office environment. The WT-1100 is a 1U 100K IOPS system
with upto 4TB capacity which will ship in the next quarter. Internally it uses
enterprise SSDs from SanDisk.
- Clarification of the roadmap and a July shuipping date for Whiptail's
previously announced highest- end controller architecture which the company
calls INFINITY - which uses
InfiniBand as the
fabric to interconnect clumps of storage racks. This will provide low
latency - even when the installed storage is scaled up to the current maximum
group size of 6 INVICTA arrays in a 360TB, 4 million IOPS, 40GB/s
configuration.
Max Riggsbee told me that Whiptail realized it
needed a different business model to efficiently meet all the different types
of needs for networked SSD storage which it was seeing from customers. And
this couldn't be done with a single product or a single route to market.
However, all of Whiptail's racks share the same back-end software and true
enterprise reliability features.
The entry level model - the WT-1100
- will be sold by channel partners. The idea is that a branch office or small
enterprise doesn't have to sacrifice enterprise grade SSD reliability just
because it only needs a smaller capacity system. To simplify the setup for
integrators and resellers - these systems are supported by an installation
wizard. (The good kind.)
For application silos which need higher
performance and more SSD capacity (the traditional
FC SAN market) the entry
level route to access Whiptail's systems will still be the INVICTA range. If
customers need to expand their fast SSD capacity - they can scale up to a 30
node configuration which protects their storage investment and which is managed
by the same unified software.
Going back to my introduction... And the
mythical User who is growing increasingly frustrated - because he genuinely
wants to escape from his predicament and move on up to the next plane of
existence.
What do we think
User
wants?
It's important for SSD rackmount vendors to make their
products easy to recognize (question #1), to be easily comprehensible (question
#2) and for future directions from suppliers to be easy to anticipate
(question #3).
Whiptail's marketing strategy can be interpreted in this
way.
If User only cares about iSCSI - the answer to questions 1 and 2
are easy. - It's an iSCSI SSD box. And you buy it from the same kind of people
you buy your other iSCSI stuff from. If you ever need more complicated stuff -
Whiptail does that too. But you don't have to get into those other mysteries
unless you really want to. As to question 3 - what will the next entry level
box look like? (A clue here is that
SanDisk is an investor
in Whiptail - and these new systems use SanDisk enterprise SSDs.) So an
easy answer to question #3 is - future boxes will get more competitively
priced.
If User's preoccupations are high end SAN compatible SSD
storage - however - User easily knows enough to guess #1 and #2. As to
question #3 - it will probably still have Infiniband as its internal fabric.
Whiptail's systems currently 40Gbps IB. An there's a whole industry with a
vested interest in keeping IB scalable and fast - so that should be a safe
choice for several more years.
(IB isn't the only choice for
clustering scalable SSD racks -
PCIe may be an
alternative competitor - but we don't have to worry about that in this context.)
Max Riggsbee told me - that even if Whiptail changes the internal flash makeup
in their storage nodes (as they have already done a few times before) their
software and the IB fabric means means their INFINITY systems should be able to
accomodate future nodes.
This means if User is trying to guess
what the next high-end box from Whiptail looks like - a reasonable guess is -
it will be compatible, scale upwards in capacity, performance, and
competitiveness and still work with the same kind of software - even if the
rocks and mushrooms inside are different to what User has seen before.
Stec goes into the iSCSI SSD box business
Editor:-
June 6, 2013 - A few years ago I wrote that one of the weaknesses Stec had in the
enterprise market - was that it didn't make an SSD box of its own. That meant
it relied on partners - to adopt its SSDs and do useful things with them. And
when you're in the SSD systems business - you lose out in many ways.
- by not investing enough in your brand
- by not having relationships with the users of SSDs
- by not being in a position to develop the
new math of
system-wide SSD IP
Recently - as we've seen in Stec's financial
reports - new design wins haven't been enough to replace older design slots
that the company has been losing.
So Stec has recently
launched
its own SSD box -
the
s3000. The easy thing to do - and that's exactly what Stec has done - is
to configure an iSCSI SSD
which is stuffed with the company's own design of 2.5"
SAS SSDs.
Anyone
can stuff a server or storage array with SSDs. Does that make a competitive
system?
It's a good idea for Stec to get into systems. But whether
it's this system and whether Stec can sell enough of them to make it
worthwhile remains to be seen.
Here's are some questions.
If
a competitor makes SAS SSDs which cost less than Stec's - then what does Stec
gain by using more of its own SSDs in the box?
If by selling systems
- Stec starts to look like a competitor to some of its past drive customers -
how will they react to the idea of using newer SSDs.
The company
doesn't really have the same choices it had a few years ago. But making an SSD
systems business work requires skills which Stec has still to prove it can
learn.
Are YOU looking for hot new ideas about SSDs?
and would you
like to meet similarly minded people?
Editor:- June 6, 2013 -
registration has
now opened for the - Flash
Memory Summit - which takes place August 13-15 in Santa Clara, CA -
where you can
hear
from, meet and talk to a lot of people who are making new things
happen in the world of flash and SSD technology.
Pricing is from
around $595 for 1day upto $1,395 for 4 days (which includes the
pre-conference- in case like me you were wondering where that extra 4th day
came from) - and also includes lunch(es).
I was surprised and gratified to see that the email I
received about this event (which is indisputably the main gig in the "advancement
of flash" annual events calendar) includes a quote from yours truly
saying that - "I now have good reasons for thinking that SSDs have the
potential to eventually become a $100 billion / year market by the close of this
decade."
So I guess it's now up to you all - out there - to prove me right.
(No pressure.) It should be easy. I stole the idea from you in the first place.
LSI's new notebook technologies and the petabyte SSD shelf
Editor:-
June 4, 2013 - LSI
did a really good job leveraging their
acquisition of
SandForce.
That's
the impression I got when I was talking last week to Kent Smith, Sr. Director of
Product Marketing who wanted to talk about the
new features
in their
SF-2200
controllers aimed at the
notebook SSD
market. These are:- Opal compliant
encryption and
DevSleep technology (a very low power sleep mode for
SATA SSDs which I
wrote about in an earlier news story lower down this page).
The data
I latched onto in LSI's presentation was that according to
3rd party analyst reports
LSI's SSD controllers were used in approximately 1/3 of all the flash memory
deployed in SSDs in the client and enterprise markets in 2012.
LSI
says that even before the start of the current quarter - the SSD world had
consumed over 21 million SF
controllers.
Now the likely productivity advantages of enterprises using SSD based
notebooks were already known
even before
the SSD notebook market began. And the benefits of having encrypted drives
to reduce the cost of exposure to data loss - when a pc goes astray in an
airport or is stolen - are exactly the same for SSDs as they were for hard
drives - and therefore need no repetition here.
The intriguing
thing for me about LSI's new consumer market controllers - as I said to
Kent - was the new possibilities that they could open up in really high
capacity enterprise arrays used in solid state archives which will eventually
replace disk backup and VTLs.
In
my roadmap to the
petabyte SSD article (March 2010) I observed that one of the missing IPs in
the SSD market (at that time) which would be needed to implement petabyte scale
physical flash storage in 1U or less - was fast boot SSDs with very low sleep
power consumption. That will enable bulk storage SSD architects to pack an SSD
array into the smallest possible physical volume - and leverage a
tape library type access
architecture at a lower cost
of ownership than tape or hard disk. But to be useful in a solid state world
- the worst case access time would need to be much faster than the 1 to 2
seconds which was the power on ready time for flash SSDs at the time of writing
that article.
LSI's implementation of DevSleep already gives a 400x
power reduction in the not needed mode - and Kent told me their power up ready
time is about 250 milli-seconds. In my view that's a good enough figure for
software architects to start planning around - and it doesn't take much of a
stretch to see how that may evolve to get shorter in the next couple of years
- if the market puts a premium on this feature.
The target for the
bulk storage SSD should be to get 5 to 10 petabytes of virtualized flash into
1U of rack height - at a power consumption level which means that every shelf
can have an identical storage density. I had a gut feel it should be do-able -
and an attractive market proposition in the 2016 to 2020 timeframe - based on
the model I published back in 2010. In some ways it should be easier now -
because I didn't anticipate just how good the
reliability
technologies for MLC and TLC would get - in particular due to the benefits
of
adaptive R/W.
So - if you have shares in a company which makes tape libraries or
disk to disk backup - you've already had many years advance warning that those
products will cease to be commercially attractive when the solid state library
market gets going.
Pure Storage tells CNBC's viewers about enterprise flash
Editor:-
June 3, 2013 - "You're not the only company that plays in this market -
correct?" - said Becky
Quick, co-anchor of CNBC's
squawkbox in a leading question to Scott Dietzen, CEO of
Pure Storage
(Monday morning).
"We weren't the first to package flash for
storage" said Dietzen. "What we did figure out uniquely was
how to get flash into a place where it was price competitive with (enterprise)
disk." ...watch
the video
Editor's comments:- "uniquely"
must have another meaning I haven't learned yet.
Demartek's new blog
Editor:- June 3, 2013 - Since
the 1990s - millions of SSD readers have gotten used to seeing the
image of a stagecoach
- dragged by choppers and driven by
mice - at the top of
web pages talking about the SSD market.
And in past graphics and
articles I've often used transport analogies and metaphors as part of the
narrative of heading towards the new storage frontier.
A more
conventional graphic of a coach with horses appears in a new blog today -
Horses,
Buggies and SSDs - by Dennis
Martin, President
Demartek who
believes "that the computer storage industry is in a similar transition
period to the one experienced in the transportation industry between 1900 and
1930, particularly as it relates to hard disk drive and solid state storage
devices." ...read
Demartek's article
renewed interest in (already interesting) Violin
Editor:-
June 3, 2013 (05:20 ET) - I noticed a small spike in search activity for Violin in the last few
days - so I thought I'd take a look at their site and see what may be behind
it.
Now this may not be it - but while I was looking - I came across
their recent blog -
Understanding
I/O: Random vs Sequential - which has a really entertaining way of
describing the implicit differences in serving up data between hard drive arrays
and SSDs.
None of the concepts discussed in it are new. But since the
1980s when I first realized the different consequences for database
performance between the fastest hard disk arrays and fast SSDs - I've never
seen such a good way of explaining the underlying differences in a way which
can be so easily "digested" by a non technical audience. You
already know these differences too - but it's a well told analogy which is why
I mention it here.
Having said that - I do wish vendors like Violin
didn't spend quite so much timestill talking about fighting the last marketing
war.
Back in 2008 - I called on SSD marketers to
end these
unrealistic SSD vs HDD IOPS comparisons. The
true competition for
enterprise SSDs in the modern era has been - other SSDs. Enterprise
users who by now (in mid 2013) don't already know the SSD HDD data deliveryand
management differences - aren't going to be won over by tech arguments. We're
already begun the year in which leading edge fast-enough enterprise SSD
arrays will beat fast hard drive arrays based
purely on
virtual capacity price points. The accountants and business managers will
be asking their IT tech people- why aren't we buying more SSDs? ...read
Violin's data diner blog
PS - my hunch is that the mini search
spike on Violin has nothing to do with their recent DBA blog - but may
instead foretell some business or product announcement to which I'm not privy.
We'll see.
This week's exciting SSD news
comes from many (physical)
locations
Editor:- June 2, 2013 - One of the things which would
certainly make it easier for me to assimilate all the info I need to understand
the SSD market better - is the ability to be in 2 different places at once.
Lower
down the needs scale - if I can't get that - would be to have 2 heads.
They
can be co-located in the same room - if you insist on that pedantic restriction
- or even á la
Zaphod
Beeblebrox (another guy whose first name begins with the letter "Z"
- you'll have noticed - it's not that unusual where I come from) attached to
the same body.
In this dual headed SSDmouse scenario - each with its
own noise cancelling headphones and directional mikes - it would be easy to
have 2 conversations about SSDs at the same time - or to conduct 1 phone
conversation simultaneously with another unrelated strand of background
reading. - OK I do that already without needing 2 heads - but seriously if I
didn't have to stop to sleep etc.. it would make my life so much easier.
Did
I say "life" I meant "job".
Let's not digress
into that work life balance mystery here and now. Trying to figure out SSDs
- and their place in the universe - is tough enough.
Anyway - let's
pretend (this is the virtual part) - if you could really be in 2 places
simultaneously this week to learn first hand about new SSD stuff - then one
of them (and this is the easy one to guess) would be
Computex in Taiwan
- where a lot of new SSD drive stuff will get introduced in the next few days.
The other place - if I even hinted what state it was - you might
guess the company - so I won't say anything yet - because I promised. And
that's before I get all those emails and calls from the people I wasn't
expecting who will dump on me their SSD revelations which will change my plans
for the day.
The next best thing - if you can't be in 2-3 places at
once - is to be right where you are now at the other end of some html physical
layering device.
Isn't the internet wonderful?
And with
the help of enough SSDs and SSD minded people (maybe like you) who don't waste
all their brainpower nostalgically figuring out how to make 1990s speed
restricted magneto-data blenders pretend to be whirling faster than they really
are - the internet will get even better.
And then - you can be in as
many places concurrently as you want - and your coffee will still be hot when
you return. (Not always - however the SLA guarantees don't go that far yet.)
More from me - later Monday.
(Or whatever day comes after whatever
day it really was supposed to be in my body's time zone today.) | |
| . |
Hmm... it looks like you're seriously
interested in SSDs.
Take a look at these resources.
SSD market
history
SSD
market research analysts
About the publisher - 21
years guiding the enterprise market |
|
| |
....... |
....... |
| ....... |
the Top SSD Companies
can you
trust SSD market data?
how fast can your SSD
run backwards?
Ratios
of SSD capacity - server vs SAN
7 SSDs silos for the pure
SSD datacenter
|
| .. |
 |
| . |
how long for hard
drives in an SSD world?
exciting new
directions in rackmount SSDs
Adaptive R/W and
DSP ECC in flash SSD IP
Efficiency - making the
same SSD - with less chips
how will Memory
Channel SSDs impact PCIe SSDs? |
| . |
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| . |
| Who
competes with this SSD company? |
Editor:- June 20, 2013 - Almost the first
question you'll ask yourself when you start getting seriously interested in any
particular SSD company is - who are its strongest competitors?
If
you're buying SSDs it helps you get the best products and the best prices.
If
you're trying to understand what a company is doing or how it fits into your map
of the SSD world then identifying the placeholder of "most similar to"
is helpful.
And if your interest in an SSD company is because you're
looking for channel partners or investment opportunities - then knowing the
competition and seeing what they're doing tells you more about the upisde
potential and limiting factors bounding your selected company.
Answering
the questions:-
who makes this type of product?
closely
followed by...
and who else does something similar?
- have
been at the root and core of my
work in the last
20 years or so. Luckily the products have changed - and so the answers have
changed too. Otherwise it would get very boring.
Going back to the "who
else does this stuff?" type questions for SSD...
As a 1st level
filter - looking at the top level directories and news pages for topics like -
SAS SSDs,
PCIe SSDs,
2.5" SSDs,
industrial SSDs
etc can be a useful starting point.
But - as some of these markets
themselves start to fragment into distinctly different segments - the problem
for someone like me is deciding when is the right time to open up a new
category.
Too soon - and not enough readers may care. But if the topic
is important enough I'll do it anyway - which is what I did last year with
adaptive R/W
& DSP ECC flash IP.
Too late - and such a list gets populated
with so many companies that the list itself becomes almost useless.
For
that reason - you'll often see a note in the profile pages of each SSD company
on this site which says something about where you can look to find alternative
competitors.
And when the comparisons become interesting - because they
reveal different technology or market approaches - then this is discussed either
in a technology article, or a news story depending on when the difference became
clear.
In the enterprise PCIe SSD market - for example - it can take a
lot of research to answer the question of who really competes with whom? Partly
because things are changing so much and partly because the definition of what is
really a true alternative is relativistic and depends on where you're starting
from - not just on the raw technical specs and price of the SSD.
The
more significant the company - especially if they're in
the Top SSD Companies
List - the more likely you are to find a recent analysis about what
they're doing and who they compete with.
My assessments may not always
agree with yours. And even my assessments have been known to change with time -
as companies change what they're doing or if I learn something new about them.
Try
it yourself and see if you find it useful.
And those other links -
which appear in most of these company profile pages - which are called "editor
mentions on StorageSearch.com" - do a simple site search on the
company name - can also lead you to closely related analysis from archived news
stories too.
Recently in the - who competes with who category - I've
updated my profile for Virident.
Although there are over 40 companies in the enterprise
PCIe SSD market -
there are only maybe 4 to 6 which make sense to look at if you're interested in
this high-end level.
I referred to this example earlier today for a
reader who I know is really more interested in
Micron.
The
Virident "competes with" list isn't the same list as I would have
created for Micron - but at the PCIe SSD product line intersection there is a
common set of competitor overlap. So that's the best I can offer today.
On
this web site - you'll find a lot of valuable information below the "fold"
as marketers like to put it. (The fold is the top part of the web page which
you can see before you start scrolling.)
When you're interested in a
subject like SSDs - as I've learned from readers who've told me they spend
nearly as much time on the site as I do - the important thing is the quality of
the information and the usefulness of the concepts - rather than the exact
choice of typeface.
And it's unrealistic and futile to imagine that
complex products like SSDs can be described in a single sentence or parameter.
There's a lot more to it than that.
But knowing who the competitors
are - is a useful shortcut in understanding any company. | | |
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| 3 years ago -
in -
SSD market
history |
Anobit samples 1st Memory Signal Processing
flash SSDs
Editor:- June 15, 2010 - Anobit
announced
it is sampling SSDs based on its patented Memory Signal Processing technology
which provide
20x improvement in operational life for MLC SSDs in high IOPS server
environments.
Based on proprietary algorithms that compensate for the
physical limitations of NAND flash, Anobit's technology (a variation of
adaptive R/W
and DSP ECC) extends standard MLC endurance from approximately 3K
read/write cycles to over 50K cycles - to make MLC technology suitable for
high-duty cycle applications.
This guarantees drive
write endurance
of 10 full disk writes per day, for 5 years, or 7,300TBs for a 400GB
drive, with fully random data (worst-case conditions).
First-generation Anobit Genesis SSDs deliver 20,000
IOPS random
write and 30,000 IOPS random read, with 180MB/s sustained write and 220MB/s
sustained read.
See also:-
SSD care cures,
acquired SSD
companies, SSD
market strategic transitions | | |
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| better thinking
inside the box |
Editor:- May 29, 2013 - If you're an enterprise
user who is already sold on the idea of using more SSDs - what could be
better than a great new SSD drive?
or...
If you're an SSD
vendor looking for the magic formula to open up vast new untapped markets
for SSDs - what kind of solution do you need to offer to attract enterprises
who aren't at the sharp end of the performance pain curve, are content with the
speed they get from HDDs and who aren't even looking at SSDs for their network
storage?
These problems have been preoccupying the SSD industry's
smartest thinkers for years.
And their answer to both questions is
the same. (Although details vary).
It's a new type of SSD box.
A new generation of enterprise SSD rackmounts is breaking all the
rules which previously constrained price, performance and reliability. The
sum impact of cleverly designed SSD arrays is systems which are many times
more competitive than you would imagine from any tear-down analysis of the
parts.
The new SSD folksy wisdom - "you can't second guess an
enterprise flash array from knowing what drives are in it" - may soon
have to join the - "you can
no longer judge
an SSD from simply knowing its memory".
The new thinking
about rackmount SSDs is explored in the new home page blog on StorageSearch.com
- better
thinking inside the box. | | |
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