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SSD news - May 10 -
30, 2013This page includes the archived SSD news from
StorageSearch.com for the above
period.
Companies mentioned on this SSD news page in recent stories
include:-
Astute Networks,
BiTMICRO,
Biwin,
Forward Insights,
LSI,
Memoright,
Microsemi,
Nexenta,
Nimbus Data,
OCZ,
Panasas,
Pure Storage,
Samsung,
SanDisk,
Skyera,
SMART Storage Systems,
Stec,
Virident, |
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Memoright launches own design of TLC SSDs
Editor:-
May 30, 2013 - Memoright
today
announced
details of its first TLC SSDs. The
XTM
Series - which are SATA
SSDs are available in 2.5"
or 1.8" form factors.
What's the big deal about - just some more
consumer SSDs?
They demonstrate Memoright's controller IP - in
adaptive R/W.
TLC is x3 flash with twice the capacity of standard MLC and 4x the virtual
storage capacity of an SLC in a single cell. It's a non trivial design job
making this 19nm geometry flash work reliably in an SSD. Memoright says this new
SSD can do 80K R/W
IOPS. As
other manufacturers like Stec
and SMART have
already shown in the server market - once a company has proven that its
adaptive flash IP works - then it proliferates quickly throughout their product
range to get competitive advantages.
Biwin implements "don't snore" mode in new
ultrabook SSDs
Editor:- May 30, 2013 - I thought I was already
pretty well versed up on
SSD related jargon but I
learned a new term today from Biwin - although it's
been kicking around the ORG
set since 2011 - and that is DEVSLP - which is a
DEVice
SLeeP (pdf) signal for SATA drives.
In the context of low power
SATA SSDs - this enables designers to completely shut down the SATA interface "saving
more power vs. the pre-existing Partial and Slumber power states". Biwin
have implemented DEVSLP in a new mSATA SSD for
ultrabooks
- which cuts down the power draw to 3mW - which they say is 100x lower than
could be done in idle mode in pre-DEVSLP SATA SSDs. Biwin is showing their
new SSD - the M5301- next week at
Computex in Taiwan.
SSD Red Herring finalists
Editor:- May 30, 2013 -
the recently published list of
Red
Herring North America finalists - includes these SSD companies.
There
may be more. I was just scanning the list and relying on my memory to spot SSD
companies.
SMART opens new R&D facility in Singapore
Editor:-
May 29, 2013 - SMART
Storage Systems
today
said
it aims to tap more of the innovative SSD technology talent in Asia by opening
a new R&D facility in Singapore.
PMC enters NVMe controller market
Editor:- May 29,
2013 - PMC
today
announced
a definitive agreement to acquire IDT's enterprise
flash controller
business and certain PCIe switch assets for $100 million.
IDT shipped the world's first NVM Express (NVMe) flash controller.
PMC believes that it will be able to improve its time-to-market in the
PCIe SSD market by
approximately 2 years due to the early product leadership and a robust design
win pipeline.
Greg
Lang, President and CEO of PMC said - "IDT's PCIe controllers are
particularly well suited for server-based SSDs targeted at
cloud data center
customers. The acquisition of IDT's Enterprise Flash Controller Business is a
strong complement to our current enterprise 12Gb/s
SAS SSD controller
product offering."
new products from Pure Storage, the significance of 38KB, and a
door opens for future government business
Editor:- May 29, 2013 -
Pure Storage
today
announced
new models in it rackmount SSD family of non-disruptively upgradeable HA storage
which double the performance of the 2U controllers to 400K 8K IOPS and
provides 12TB of raw storage in 2U. In a related
video
the company said - the average size of I/O requests its customers see
is 38KB - which is why Pure Storage has stopped using 4KB IOPS metrics
in its sales literature.
Editor's comments:- The rack density
of Pure Storage's new
FA-400 systems
(approx 10TB usable/ U for a 10U stack using a mix of 2U controller shelves
which manage 2U storage racks which each have upto 24x 512GB
SAS SSDs inside) is
low by comparison to industry leaders.
From a business point of view
this means their architecture may not be the first choice for customers looking
for huge installations of SSD (scaling to hundreds of
petabytes) or who
have datacenters in expensive city locations where increasing the square
footage of storage or server cabinet space is simply not an option - and for
whom higher density (SSD TB/U) outweighs any hypothetical considerations such
as lower cost per terabyte to buy.
The company says it has shipped
hundreds of units.
How you interpret that will depend on your
perspective. It's small by comparison to competitors which have been in the
market longer - but also indicates that the product works and the company is
capable of developing business in the difficult to reach smaller customers who
were orphaned by the earlier stages of enterprise SSD adoption which focused
more on SSD-CPU equivalency as the economic justification rather than simply
displacing HDD arrays. Pure Storage's business model is the harder nut to crack
- but is a bigger market opportunity - which has no clear leaders at the
present time.
In another interesting
announcement
today Pure Storage today said it is receiving an investment from
In-Q-Tel (IQT), the investment firm that
identifies innovative technology solutions to support the missions of the US
Intelligence Community. The partnership will allow Pure Storage to further
develop its FlashArray technology to meet the unique needs of IQT's government
customers.
This is just speculation on my part - but one of the big
headaches for users with sensitive info on hard drives is the cost and secure
logistics associated with
disk sanitization
when storage drives reach end of service life.
The only trustworthy
way to deal with hard
drives is to physically shred the drives into little pieces. SSDs present
different challenges for this end of the data lifecycle - but also offer more
technical solutions - such as built-in
destructive fast-purge
- but that adds to the cost of the drives. Within the context of an SSD rack -
it should be possible to integrate reliable software based data shredding -
which would save costs
for customers who factor in these considerations.
OCZ gets filing extension from NASDAQ
Editor:- May
28, 2013 - OCZ
today
announced
it can remain listed on the NASDAQ Stock Market subject to meeting ongoing
filing obligations with the SEC by September 16.
Microsemi's new SSD for vetronics can erase 256GB in < 8S
Editor:-
May 23, 2013 - Microsemi
today
announced that it has
secured multiple design-wins for its new Series 200 TRRUST-Stor (rugged self
encrypting, 2.5" SATA SSD with 256GB SLC capacity and
fast purge).
The
company says a full hardware-based erase takes less than 8 seconds. The 200
model has R/W throughput which is twice as fast as the company's earlier
TRRUST-Stor due to a new generation of the company's Armor processor.
Developed to endure harsh environments the new SSD - which has
hardware-implemented AES 256 encryption - can withstand up to 3,000G shock and
30G rms of vibration.
BiTMICRO launches low power rugged SSD
Editor:- May
23, 2013 - BiTMICRO
today
launched
a new low power consumption (2W active)
2.5"
industrial
temperature operation, rugged,
SATA SSD which
supports many different types of
military
sanitization. The
Ace Drive
I-series has 4,900 / 2,500
R/W IOPS, a
regular cache,
and capacity from 8GB upto 512GB (MLC).
Skyera unifies 19/20 nm MLC flash arrays with 100x life
Editor:-
May 21, 2013 - Skyera
today
announced
it has added unified storage operation (concurrent NAS and SAN) to its
pre-existing SSD box.
Editor's
comments:- this was already anticipated and factored in by potential
systems competitors that I've spoken to in the past several quarters.
More
interesting for me - is the "100x MLC life amplification" figure
quoted in
a
recent blog by Skyera's CEO.
When you're asking what's possible
from combining controller
technologies (like
adaptive R/W)
with software efficiencies
(don't do things which are unnecessary to access the true app data - as opposed
to emulating every just-in-case-we-need-it lookahead or spurious hard drive
traffic request) the 100x figure is a useful competitive metric. It's all about
being at the leading edge of the system
SSD price curve.
See also:- MLC
Seniors live longer in my SSD care home
Stec's profiler removes guesswork in sizing SSD caches for
hybrid storage pools
Editor:- May 21, 2013 -
Stec today
announced
that it's offering a free profiling tool -
EnhanceIO
Profiler - which can enable users to determine how much benefit they would
get from using its
EnhanceIO
(SSD caching software) - before they even install any SSDs.
The
company says that the "non-disruptive installation" can save hours of
administrative trial and error by recommending the optimal block size, and the
capacity and type of SSDs to be used for maximum performance gain. See
also:- auto-caching
SSDs, SSD performance
testing, will
SSDs end bottlenecks? - and cure all my server speed worries?
Samsung in volume production of 11 DWPD SATA SSD - SM843T
Editor:- May 21, 2013 - There are so many
SATA SSDs - it's hard
to tell them apart - and harder to quickly sort out what they're good for.
In the case of SATA SSDs for the
enterprise in
particular - the clue words have changed a lot in the past 9 years.
- In the beginning - the clue was the
memory. If it was SLC -
that nearly always meant enterprise. because SLC was the
good kind of flash -
and consumers couldn't afford
it.
But from about
2009 onwards -
as flash controller
designers got smarter - "enterprise" stopped meaning "SLC".
Now most enterprise SSDs use the same naughty kind of flash
as consumers. All modern civilian SATA SSDs are MLC - whether they're for
enterprise or consumer markets. (It's a mixed picture in the
industrial SSD
market and different again in
military.)
- Then it was endurance.
But endurance of the memory isn't the same as endurance of the SSD. So
SSD vendors started to talk about
diskful writes per day
(or unlimited writes and other things) - as a way to signal what kind of slot
you could put their new SATA SSD in.
- Then it was data
integrity.
I remember seeing web pages from some SSD makers which
explained that the way they differentiated between enterprise and
consumer SSDs was
that the consumer models had one level of recoverable error rates - while
their enterprise models were much better. That wasn't really enough of a
difference though.
- I nearly forgot to say that at one time the differentiator in enterprise
SATA SSDs was speed - measured in throughput and
IOPS.
But
speed stopped being a useful clue - because fast consumer SATA SSDs can be
faster than slow enterprise SSDs. (Unlike a
notebook -
where all your
SSD benefits are assumed to come from a single lonely SSD, the situation in
the enterprise array is that the population of SSDs in a
RAID type array all pull
together. And in fast-enough SSD racks - the economics of the box stems from
not offering overly extravagant performance.)
- Another trend - which we've been seeing for a few years now - is for SATA
SSD vendors to talk about the fact that their enterprise SATA SSDs have
protection
circuits which cope with sudden power failure.
The assumption here
being that if your SSD is in a notebook your don't need this protection. Why's
that? - because you've got a rechargeable battery - so you're going to get a
warning before the power rail drops.
Another assumption is that
consumers don't really care so much about their data. (Not enough to pay more
for the difference - or do backups.)
On
the other hand if you use a Wintel notebook in earnest - you'll be familiar
with the technique of pulling out the battery to reset it when the OS has
gone awol. This procedure is more survivable for
hard drives than
SSDs - due to cleverly designed springs and other things - which have evolved
over the decades. Pulling the battery out in a thrashing SSD notebook can be the
start of learning about an expensive type of service called
data recovery. Anyway
- the SATA SSD news today is that Samsung has announced
volume shipments of a new model for the enterprise - the SM843T.
You
can tell it's for the enterprise - because the company says - "it protects
the most recent data being processed from a sudden power interruption, for
enhanced system reliability..." and "the 960GB model is rated at
20,000 sequential TBW (Terabytes Written)" - which approximates to 11 DWPD.
And
before you go - what about the changing relevance of SATA SSD itself for the
enterprise?
- SATA SSDs were the successors to
SCSI HDDs (the old
parallel kind)
It's a bit
more complicated than
that - but that'll do for now.
we're #2 in PCIe SSDs and growing fast - says LSI
Editor:-
May 15, 2013 - LSI
today
announced
it shipped over 40,000 PCIe
SSDs in the past 12 months - and has been ranked the #2 merchant supplier
of enterprise PCIe SSDs in the US, and the fastest growing in this category
according to a recent report by Forward Insights.
Virident acquires flash VP from EMC
Editor:- May 15,
2013 - Virident
has recently recruited Ken
Grohe as VP worldwide customer operations. Grohe came from EMC where he was VP and GM
of their Flash Business Unit.
...Later:- in a
press
release (May 21, 2013) Virident confirmed the above news and coupled it to
the appointment of Keith
Carpenter (formerly co-founder of
Cache IQ) as Virident's new
VP of sales, Americas.
Skyera increments SSD brainiacs headcount
Editor:-
May 14, 2013 - Skyera
today
announced
its new chief architect is Andy Tomlin -
who was formerly VP of SSD Development at WD and before that
was VP of firmware and software at SandForce.
3 SSD winners from Network Products Guide
Editor:-
May 14, 2013 - 3 SSD companies were recently named by Network Products Guide in
their Annual
Hot Companies and Best Awards
new report by Forward Insights ranks SSD vendors by revenue
Editor:-
May 13, 2013 - Forward
Insights has published a new report
SSD Supplier Status
2012 ($4,250) which among other things ranks vendors by revenue in these
key markets:-
See also:-
SSD analysts,
market research news | |
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