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Netlist says ULLtraDIMM
SSDs infringe patents
Editor:- January 29, 2014 - Netlist today
announced
it had filed motions to add two additional patents to the lawsuits against the
previously
announced
ULLtraDIMM memory module from
Diablo Technologies
and
Smart Storage
Systems.
The 2 newly added patents (U.S. Patent Nos. 7,881,150
and 8,081,536) are generally related to load reduction, a critical feature in
low latency memory modules. Netlist has now asserted a total of 7 patents
against the ULLtraDIMM, in addition to trade secret theft, trademark
infringement and other claims.
"We
have spent years developing our industry-leading technology, and are encouraged
by the progress we've made defending our intellectual property in these
lawsuits," said Netlist President and CEO, C.K. Hong. "We
will continue to vigorously defend our IP, uncovering any and all theft of our
technology and infringement of our patents, and will not allow others to profit
from this unlawful activity."
As
reported
in its 8-K last December, Netlist says it received a whistleblower letter
describing in detail how Diablo "stole Netlist's detailed architecture and
design" of its flagship product, HyperCloud, to create the ULLtraDIMM.
Editor's
comments:- SanDisk's ULLtraDIMM is a
new class of
product in which cheap high capacity
MLC flash emulates many
DRAMs in a module which
contains little or no DRAM itself but which nevertheless plugs into a DDR3
module.
In contrast - Netlist's "similar sounding but very
different" product families include real DRAMs which accomplish power
fail data protection aka non volatility - by means of fast backup and
restore to onboard flash - all in the same DDR3 module.
Netlist
doesn't appear to be saying that it could design a product like the ULLtraDIMM -
because it doesn't to my knowledge have the
flash
controller IP to do anything remotely similar.
Instead - what
Netlist appears to be saying is that techniques in DDR3 design - which enable
lots of circuitry to be placed behind a RAM interface - without placing too
much load on it and slowing it down - which Netlist has itself patented - are
suspected to have been used within the design of the ULLtraDIMM.
ARM licenses MRAM from Crocus
Editor:- January 29,
2014 - Crocus Technology
today announced it has licensed its
MLU
(Magnetic Logic Unit) technology (aka MRAM)
to ARM to use as a potential
alternative to flash memory
in future micro-controllers.
Among other characteristics - Crocus's
MLU
technology can provide low density NVM functionality which operates up to
250 degrees C.
See also:-
10+ years of - "MRAM
will soon replace flash"
Apacer's new waterproof SSD
Editor:- January 28, 2014
-
Apacer says it
wil demonstrate a new "seamless waterproof SSD that operates even when
immersed in water" on Booth #700 at the
DistribuTECH 2014 show which
starts today in San Antonio, TX.
see also:-
industrial SSDs
SSD revenues don't figure in Seagate's results
Editor:-
January 28, 2014 - Seagate
said yesterday in its earnings
conference call it expects the average capacity of the
hard drives it ships in
2014 will exceed 1TB per drive (up a little from
920MB
/ drive already in the recent quarter.)
Re SSDs - nothing of note
was revealed because Seagate "sees a need for confidentiality due to
competitive concerns." Seagate said it continues to look at organic growth
and inorganic growth (acquisitions)
in its SSD product portfolio.
SNIA proposes new standard for virtualizing SSD implemented
memory
Editor:- January 27, 2014 - It's years since the first
thoroughbred
SSD software horses
were seen to be leaving the stables - but last week - a
standards ORG - SNIA
announced
an effort to bolt these doors with the release of version 1 of what it hopes
will be a new standard called the
NVM
Programming Model (pdf)
Editor's comments:- Currently if
you use SSDs as memory using
PCIe SSDs from
Fusion-io or
Virident, or if you
plan to use memory channel SSDs from
SanDisk - then you're
potentially looking at working in 3 different software environments.
The
viable permutations of hardware and software compatibility levels shrink for
users when they converge at a popular market application level such as
virtual desktops - but explode into crazy unsupportability for 3rd party
software developers as they try to step back from proprietary APIs and hang
onto more general hooks in operating systems which were never designed around
the core class of capabilities offered by low latency SSDs.
Whether
the long term solution to the
current messy
state of ad hoc SSD software lies in adapting current OS's - or maybe in
bypassing old OS's entirely and starting again with cloud level service-like
abstrations in virtualized servers - is interesting to speculate.
In the meantime software developers have to work with existing de-facto software
environments (to generate revenue) and also keep an eye on future standards in
the hope that standardization will reduce their costs (one day in the remote
future).
The SSD software platform and the optimum level of
engagement for vendors is a lottery which will suck billions more dollars from
VCs before it is resolved. And I think that market dominance will be a bigger
part of the solution than a set of committee based standards.
ESG reports on clustering Virident's PCIe SSDs
Editor:-
January 23, 2014 - ESG
today published a
test
report for Virident
/ HGST's FlashMAX
II (PCIe SSDs)
which validated the ability of this product family and its
related software
(vShare ) to be configured for useful operation in an Oracle RAC environment
in high
availability configurations which were clustered via
Infiniband.
Although
ESG said performance was good they also commented on some current
limitations of the product suite for this type of application. In particular:-
- the lack of a graphical interface for setup and performance mintoring,, and
- the lack of support for other supported fabrics such as 10GbE (mentioned
in the report as a future option), and PCIe fabric (which was not mentioned at
all in this report).
Diablo appoints new VP Engineering to advance Memory Channel
Storage roadmap
Editor:- January 23, 2014 - Diablo Technologies
today
announced
the appointment of Jim
Miller as the company's new VP Engineering - in which rolse he will be
responsible for advancing the company's
Memory Channel
Storage roadmap and engineering accomplishments. See also:-
memory channel
SSDs
Editor's comments:- Among other things - 2 predictable
enhancements to this technology - based on my past interviews with SanDisk and
Diablo - will be future support for DDR4, and being able to use these systems
with less server DRAM or no DRAM
at all. The latter has been tested but is not being offered as a standard
feature yet.
This is what it takes to be #2 in PCIe SSDs
Editor:-
January 22, 2014 - LSI
said today in its
quarterly
financial report it has shipped over 100,000
PCIe SSDs since it
entered this market in April 2012.
Editor's comments:- LSI
shipped 60,000 units in the 8 months from May to December 2013 (a figure
calculated by subtracting the numbers contained in an
earlier
announcement.)
Despite those impressive numbers - LSI itself
estimates that it is still the #2 company in this market. Which gives you an
idea of how large this market has grown.
re Fusion-io's results - and the value of showing you can speak
fluent rackmount when it's your logo on the outside of the box
Editor:-
January 22, 2014 - Fusion-io
today
reported
that revenue for the quarter ended December 31, 2013 was $94.5 million (22%
decline compared to the year ago period).
Editor's comments:-
As reported on these pages previously - and aside from the growing number of
strong competitors in the PCIe
SSD market - particular factors which compressed FIO's revenue growth were:-
- sensitivity to big orders in previous years from a small set of super
customers
- competitive issues related to the
rackmount SSD market
- which is becoming a growing strategic part of the product mix for Fusion-io -
as the company aspires to be the primary system brand - rather than - as in
previous years - an almost invisible
component inside
someone else's box.
In addition to the same issues which affect all
established vendors in the SSD box market (lead times to identify, qualify and
satisfy prospective users) - in many respects Fusion-io will still be regarded
as a "rackmount newbie" by most enterprise SSD users - whether or
not they are already customers of its server acceleration products. That's
because there's a lot of stuff you have to know and prove as a vendor in
rackmounts - which is different to the case with cards and modules.
So
although the evolving
rackmount SSD market offers a potential growth opportunity and
diversification of routes to market for Fusion-io - it's by no means an easy
market to conquer - and vendors have to demonstrate by their investments in
systems related testing reports and marketing - that they are serious. The
customer diversification theme was referred to in this earnings report - in
which FIO's CEO Shane Robison
said "...We are continuing to diversify our customer base, with nearly
6,000 end-user customers worldwide now using Fusion ioMemory-based solutions to
accelerate their data center applications."
Also mentioned in this
report was the company's continuing effort to demonstrate that it can "speak
fluent rackmount" -
citing
new benchmarks and customers of its
iSCSI
hybrids.
Fusion-io
continues to be cautious with its revenue guidance. As we've seen recently in
the enterprise SSD market with other vendors - executing well technically -
even in a fast growing market doesn't guarantee that you'll get the business
- because competitors are growing in numbers and growing in specialized
marketing competence too.
Who's who in SSD? - It's IBM Jim - but not as we know it
Editor:-
January 22, 2014 - StorageSearch.com
today published a new article -
Who's who in SSD? -
It's IBM Jim - but not as we know it.
This aggregates my IBM-SSD
related news coverage and articles from the past week into a single topic,
more easily digestible, permalinked format. ...read the article
Virtium ships rugged 32GB 10-pin eUSB SSD
Editor:-
January 22, 2014 - Virtium
announced
availability of the highest capacity SLC-based 10-pin eUSB module - the
TuffDrive
10-pin eUSB - which has 32GB capacity, is designed to meet MIL-810
(shock, vibration, altitude, humidity) and has with sustained R/W speeds upto
160MB/s and 125MB/s respectively. The new device is also available with a
write disable switch option.
OCZ relaunches as a Toshiba Group company
Editor:-
January 21, 2014 - Toshiba
today
announced
some details of how OCZ
Storage Solutions (which was based on the recently acquired assets of
OCZ Technology Group) will operate within the Toshiba Group of Companies.
The new OCZ Storage Solutions, under the continuing direction of CEO Ralph Schmitt
- will leverage Toshiba's cutting-edge NAND and combine it with the company's
proprietary controllers, firmware and software to provide both client and
enterprise customers with innovative and cost-effective SSD solutions.
OCZ Storage Solutions will continue to maintain its established
worldwide sales channels. Its headquarters will remain in San Jose, California,
with strategic design centers located in Irvine (California), Tel Aviv (Israel),
and Abingdon (UK).
"The acquisition of OCZ further expands our
solid-state storage capabilities and represents Toshiba's commitment to this
high-growth area," said Seiichi Mori, VP of Toshiba's
Semiconductor and Storage Company. "Our goal is to offer a leading edge
portfolio of solid state solutions to address the storage challenges faced by
both client and enterprise customers, and the acquisition of OCZ is an ideal
addition to our team in realizing this strategy."
The acquisition
provides Toshiba with OCZ's enterprise and client SSD businesses and enables the
established OCZ brand to continue in full force with a current product portfolio
that includes SATA and PCIe consumer drives for high-performance and mainstream
applications, and SATA,
SAS and
PCIe enterprise drives
supported by virtualization,
cache and acceleration
software.
Editor's comments:- The new OCZ - starts out in a
strong competitive position - as it not only inherits a well established
enterprise SSD business (which I discussed in an
article in November
2013) - but it sheds many of the disadvantages which limited the revenue
scalability of the old OCZ entity in the year leading up to its bankruptcy.
Immediate
advantages which the new OCZ will benefit from include:-
- less constrained future access to
flash memory for its SSDs
The old OCZ suffered from allocation and cost issues related to its
perceived riskiness as a flash customer.
- strengthening of the
brand.
OCZ's
brand was already very strong in the SSD market. But for some customers in
enterprise and embedded markets - there would always be an element of doubt
about the long term roadmaps due to instabilities in the SSD market. Now as
part of the long established Toshiba group of companies - many users will be
happy to temporarily set such concerns aside - and focus more on the individual
merits of particular products and their technical suitability .
- access to more flash
and SSD IP.
While every
acquisition in the
SSD market is different - early indications are that OCZ could become a
launch pad for integrating and expanding some of Toshiba's legacy SSD assets
into bigger markets - especially in the enterprise segments. sizing
the scale of market for ULLtraDIMM SSDs
Editor:- January 21, 2014
- On the face of it the raw text of SanDisk's
announcement
- confirming what most of us already suspected (IBM's new eXFlash DIMMs are
indeed rebranded SanDisk
ULLtraDIMM
SSDs) didn't add materially to the sum of human knowledge about SSDs - but
in a conversation yesterday afternoon with Esther Spanjer
Director of Marketing at SanDisk
I got some interesting new insights into how the
memory channel
SSD Trinity (IBM,
SanDisk and
Diablo Technologies)
publicly think about this new proposition.
cost - Esther
didn't really want to discuss the detailed market price per terabyte of
ULLtraDIMMs - but it's clear that SanDisk is comfortable with a top level
analysis which for simplicity starts with assuming that a terabte of fast
PCIe SSD (from say Virident
or Fusion-io) costs
about the same as a terabyte of fast flash DIMM SSD.
Commencing
from that assumption IBM/SanDisk/Diablo are saying that users can get lower
system costs - in high end virtual desktops - using flash DIMMs - because they
support about 2x as many users in each server as industry standard
PCIe SSDs. Contributory factors are that ULLtraDIMMs have lower latency, and
also incur a lower DRAM
footprint.
The stinger in the tail is that the ULLtraDIMM solution uses
19nm
flash (due to
adaptive R/W)
- whereas all the ultrafast PCIe SSDs use more expensive traditionally
managed flash memory - which tilts the balance in cost comparison roadmaps.
Esther
also drew my attention to 2 interlinked performance aspects of the
ULLtraDIMM architecture (which I would describe as
SSD symmetry
characteristics) which intrinsically lend themselves better to some types of
applications. These are:-
- deterministic latency:- SanDisk has some benchmark results which show
that its ULLtraDIMM latency has low jitter - compared to some competing PCIe
SSDs.
SanDisk's SSD isn't unique having this characteristic. But what
is unique is being able to maintain this at a latency which is 2x to 3x better
than PCIe SSDs. This opens up new market applications - for motherboard based
SSD acceleration which previously had been restricted to more expensive FC
RAM SSDs.
- scalability:- Esther said that the
IOPS and
aggregate throughput of ULLtraDIMM SSDs scales almost linearly as additional
modules are added to a server. (This had been one of the original architecture
intentions stated by Diablo a year earlier.)
Esther said the 2
things which make it easier for ULLtraDIMM SSDs to do this are:- the higher
performance ceiling of the DRAM bus in servers compared to PCIe, and the fact
that the memory channel doesn't get interrupted and throttled in the same way as
PCIe lanes by other I/O devices in the same system.
(SanDisk's
ULLtraDIMM SSDs aren't unique in satisfying this desirable trait of performance
scalability in motherboard acceleration however, despite the fact that their
selected benchmark
comparison product suggests otherwise.) Another thing we touched
on was flash memory supply issues.
As SanDisk's ULLtraDIMM
SSDs are single sourced - it's reasonable to ask what would happen if IBM
ramped up its demand for these products?
That looks to me like a
situation where being part of a large
flash memory maker is an
advantage - compared say to being a small SSD startup at the end of a supply
chain. My guess is that if IBM demand for flash DIMMs ramped in the forseeable
market environment (in which fab capacity for all flash is finite) - then
SanDisk would probably prioritise this higher value enterprise SSD product
compared to allocating flash chip capacity to lower margin
consumer outlets.
That
leads on to the question of - how much revenue will this ULLtraDIMM SSD
bring to SanDisk in the next 18 months?
I didn't discuss that
particular question with Esther. - But it's an interesting thought experiment.
My thinking goes something like this.
I begin my recipe
by adding together the combined historic revenue of some comparable high
performance PCIe SSD companies (for example Fusion-io plus Virident). Let's
unitize this raw ingredient and call it "one".
Next come
some scaling factors. (Yours may be
different.)
We need to take into account and interpret the market
success that
IBM
disclosed recently in its rackmount SSD announcement and also factor in an
adjustment for market-receptiveness for new SSD server solutions which
promise to cost less than previous solutions, while being offered from a "safe
supplier" (and which don't force users to learn new software).
Toss
these factors into your market model blender and whirr gently for about 30
seconds - remembering to screw the lid on tightly.
Then I think a
modest ramp up revenue frothing model for this type of product would look
like "three" (3x the number you started with) but "five" or
higher might not be too wild either.
Remember this is only a
starting point. Because if you assume instead that IBM isn't the only channel
for these products - and may not even prove to the biggest route to market
then you need to go back to the
assumptions cupboard
and get a bigger blender.
But let's stay with the simple IBM case for
now.
How would all that impact competitors?
server
competitors?
Esther said IBM thinks this technology makes IBM
more competitive than other server companies in high end markets while also
being aware of the inevitably looming reality that SSD enhanced servers
reduce the number of servers that users need. (To do the same things they did
before.)
SSD competitors? - (This is my initial assessment.)
The
total market for SSD enhanced servers is growing more
complex as new
SSD software vendors
are enabling new architectural uses of servers - software defined storage being
just one example. As
I said in
2011 - the SSD market is changing from a world in which few servers had
SSDs inside to a world in which all new servers are enhanced by SSDs. As users
have diverse business needs - these trends can only be satisfied by an equally
diverse range of systems - in which
SATA SSDs,
PCIe SSDs and
memory channel
SSDs all play a part.
In the short term (1 year from general
availability) memory channel SSDs - like SanDisk's ULLtraDIMM SSDs - will take
part of the market previously occupied by fast PCIe SSDs and some of the
market previously satisfied by very fast rackmount SSDs. But they cannot replace
all these functions at the present time (due to capacity limitations, physical
proximity / distance constraints and high availability considerations - just
to mention a few factors).
On the other hand - by enabling 10TB class
memory as a commodity in servers - the new SSDs will also enable new
applications which were previously impossible or uneconmic.
Overall - I
think that in the next few years (while being vulnerable to the same
disruptive revenue shrinkage effects of improved SSD utilization ratios -
which I discussed
the SSD software
horizon and which can affect all vendors) the aggregate impact of the
ULLtraDIMM SSD market should be viewed as being mostly additive to market
revenue in a growing enterprise SSD space rather than being cannibalistic.
And
I'm confident that will attract new competitors in the memory channel SSD
space - either by alternative competing designs, new licensing options for
Diablo's memory IP, or new server designs in which the flash controller
management is designed into the stahdard motherboard.
InnoDisk announces volume production of industrial nanoSSD
Editor:-
January 20, 2014 -InnoDisk
today
announced
full scale production of its
nanoSSD
(a tiny
industrial SSD)
that conforms to JEDEC's
standard (MO-276).
Innodisk integrates a
flash control chip,
NAND flash, and ball grid array (BGA) package to deliver a nanoSSD that requires
only about 1% of the volume (16mm x 20mm x2mm) of a
2.5" SSD.
InnoDisk's
nanoSSDs has R/W speeds upto 500MB/s and 170MB/s respectively), high
shock-resistance, quick erase features, and ATA security.
IBM shows off what's it's been doing with the RamSan rackmount
SSD product line it acquired from TMS - and also launches first memory
channel SSD based servers
Editor:- January 16, 2014 - For most of
the previous decade (2000 to 2009) Texas Memory Systems
was THE company which competitors aspired to match in market position when it
came to fast
rackmount SSDs.
In the early part of this decade (2010 to
2012) TMS lost
its monopoly on rackmounts as it inevitably had to share the expanding market
with a lot of other companies - starting with
Violin (which overtook
TMS in
brand strength
in 2011) and then
other companies like WhipTail,
Kaminario,
Pure Storage,
Nimbus and
Skyera which had all
established strong market recognition by the end of
2012.
But
in those latter years (from
2009 onwards)
not only was TMS competing against all those newbie rackmount vendors - but
it was also engaged in another hotly contested
part of the enterprise
SSD market in fast PCIe
SSDs - where its product line was trying to find a place somewhere in the
narrowing gaps between Fusion-io
and Virident.
Then a year ago - in January 2013 -
IBM completed the
acquisition of TMS (which had been announced in
August 2012) and
since then we haven't heard much about these products apart from a few
glimpses - which enabled us to observe that TMS's rackmount products had been
retained and renamed - while their PCIe products were quietly end of lifed.
This
week - among other things - IBM has launched a new fast rackmount SSD family -
whose controller
architecture is effectively an enhanced adaptation of TMS's 8th
generation RamSan with some tweaks to incorporate newer memory, iron
out some RAS wrinkles (you can now change everything inside from the front or
back - without sliding the rack out) and a big investment to present a
software friendly face. The new software capabilities are being done by
products which are being offered as external-to-the-box unbundled
subsystems (control enclosures) for those who want them. This means that the
performance and efficiency of the raw flash array isn't compromised in any way.
IBM's
new SSD box (a 2U
HA 16GB
FC fast rackmount SSD with
upto 48TB usable capacity,
priced at $683K
approx list) is called the
IBM
FlashSystem 840.
Earlier this week I spent an hour talking about
this new product with Woody Hutsell
and Levi Norman -
who are both now back in the IBM branded TMS fold having both sampled the
delights of some other leading SSD companies in recent years. Woody wrote about
his experiences
in a recent blog.
As I've known both of them for many years - I
couldn't help but start by saying - "This feels like one of those movies -
where they decide to make a sequel many years after - but all the actors look
much older. It's lucky for us this conversation isn't going out on YouTube."
You
can get a flavor of what IBM thinks it's doing with this new product - and more
details in its
briefing
document (pdf) - and I won't repeat much of that detail here.
Woody
said "It's interesting to me how much attention the flash operation is
getting within IBM's storage organization."
He went on to say
that IBM's big commitments to flash such as the $1 billion investment
announced last April
are seen within IBM as popular actions "which are important as we need to
compete." As a result - many competent people (in IBM) want to be a part
of the flashsystems effort.
Anther change in scale since TMS became
part of IBM is that the size of the development team for the flash systems
rackmount has quadrupled.
Sales are good too. IBM has shipped
over 1,500 of these flashsystems. In effect Woody said this was
limited by the fact that for 3 quarters IBM shipped everything they had planned
to make.
Woody said he thought that this alone - even without all the
other SSDs which IBM was selling into the enterprise market meant that IBM was
probably on its way to be one of the biggest vendors in the market.
I
said - a dominant market share in enterprise flash in 2014 might look like 5
or 10 per cent as there are hundreds of companies in the market. - We'll have
to see how things work
out.
But my guess is that with a few assumptions about density,
channels etc this means this rackmount IBM product line has possibly been
generating about $500 million of revenue in the past year - which explains where
some of the revenue missing from competitors' reports may have gone to.
Something
else which appeared in the briefing paper singing the praises of IBM's
expanding universe of enterprise flash product offerings - eXFlash DIMMs -
sounded to me like just another name for
SanDisk's
memory channel
SSDs (later
confirmed
to be the case) which appeared in another announcement
IBM
server announcements today - see footnotes for more.
What's my
final take on this? (FlashSystem 840 announcement)
IBM is now the
company to make comparisons with if you're looking for fast rackmount SSDs with
some high availability options. Particularly if you're working in a complex
environment - are a big customer and think you will be reassured by the
availability of compatible products and pre sales technical sales support.
IBM's
density - in terms of rack units needed to build a
petabyte SSD - is
better than some other fast systems - but remains an order of magnitude less
efficient than
Skyera - due to the
difference between IBM's use of eMLC compared to Skyera's claimed ability to
use TLC due to
adaptive
controller architecture - which is 2 generations (4 years) ahead of what's
used in this particular IBM box. (Having said that - IBM does already use some
degree of adaptive flash SSD technology in other systems - by virtue of the
SSDs it designed in from
SMART.)
Going
back to scary Skyera
- "On the other hand" - I said to Woody - "Skyera doesn't have
the same HA
or software in place
yet. But not everyone needs all these features."
Overall - for
competitors in the same high performance and reliability class as this new IBM
box (which includes companies like Violin,
Fusion-io etc) - IBM
can still be beaten on
price. It was ever
thus.
Footnotes - IBM's first memory channel SSD servers
In
another
IBM
SSD announcement today (alluded to above) about its new server
architecture which leverages
memory channel
SSDs - and making a comparison with
PCIe SSDs - IBM said -
"Our evaluators are seeing 5-10 microseconds write latency for eXFlash
DIMMs in preliminary testing vs. 15-19 microseconds latency for PCIe-based flash
storage from Fusion-io,
Micron, and
Virident, and 65
microseconds latency for
Intel S3500 and S3700
SSDs."
We've seen increasing granularity of detail emerge about
the system characteristics of memory channel SSDs emerging in a trickle of
announcements, and experimental user reports in the past year. Now that the new
flash DIMM SSD products are becoming generally available - there will soon be
better clarity on real world costs and performance.
new technology report - How 3D NAND flash Stacks Up
Editor:-
January 15, 2014 - "In the 2D planar era, the basic underlying floating
gate technology (with a few exceptions) was essentially the same amongst all the
NAND flash manufacturers, however in the 3D era (which has recently begun) all
NAND flash memory
manufacturers are developing different 3D architectures" said Gregory Wong, President, Forward Insights
in a recent email introducing a new market report ($5,499) called
How 3D
NAND Stacks Up (outline pdf) - which is co-authored with
NaMLab (Nano-electronic Materials
Laboratory) - in Dresden, Germany.
The new report describes the
various different approaches to 3D NAND design and provides an independent view
of the technical challenges which memory vendors have to solve to deliver
viable competing memories at different geometries.
more signs of LSI aiming to be everywhere in SSDs
Editor:-
January 13, 2014 - For those who like pictures - an overview of
consumer SSD form
factors - written by Kent
Smith of LSI
can be seen in a recent
article on
TechSpot.com.
Uncoincidentally - and reaffirming its ambitions in
the enterprise market
- LSI also announced today that its
PCIe
SSDs will be used by Oracle
in its
Exadata
database systems.
get ready for a world in which all enterprise data touches SSDs
Editor:-
January 8, 2014 - StorageSearch.com
today published a new article -
get ready for a
world in which all enterprise data touches SSDs.
"The winners
in SSD software could be as important for infrastructure as Microsoft was for
PCs, or Oracle was for databases, or Google was for online search." ...read the article
Half Micron's nand flash now used in SSDs
Editor:-
January 7, 2014 - In a conference call related to financial results
reported
for the quarter ended November 28, 2013 - which headlined on improved DRAM
results - Micron
said:-
- its nand flash business surpassed $1 billion revenue for the 1st time
- SSDs accounted for 48% of trade volume in nand flash (of which
2/3 was consumer
SSDs)
- in addition to traditional demand from the mobile market (phones etc)-
the company had identified
industrial
embedded applications in automotive markets as a business opportunity which
itself was taking around 10% of flash volume
- the big volume ramp for 3d nand flash was anticipated to be in the 2nd
half of 2015
business analytics will drive IT investment in 2014
Editor:-
January 6, 2014 - Gartner
today
said that the need to
leverage the B2C customer experience through better analytics will be a key
driver of investment in IT in 2014.
SanDisk inside award winning notebook
Editor:-
January 6, 2014 - SanDisk
today
announced
that its X110 mSATA
SSDs are used inside an award winning W8 notebook from
Asus - the
UX301LA.
LaCie announces "PCIe SSD inside" desktop
Editor:-
January 6, 2014 - LaCie
today announced
imminent availability of its
Little Big Disk
Thunderbolt 2 - a
Thunderbolt
compatible desktop storage box with 2x
PCIe Gen 2 SSDs inside
for apps such as video editing.
what's Pure Storage worth?
Editor:- January 4, 2014 -
a recent
article in Forbes.com names Pure Storage in
a list of private tech companies - which in the opinion of CB
Insights (a VC
culture market research
company) may be worth over $1 billion.
Editor's comments:- in
the past year it has become much more difficult to make reliable estimates of
what an SSD is worth - due to the changing competitive outlook in which there
are no easy winners. And leadership
within a product segment for 2, 3 or 4 years
no
longer guarantees success in the same way as it used to.
COO departs Violin
Editor:- January 2, 2014 - Violin Memory today
announced
the departure of COO Dixon R. Doll, Jr.
reviewing Fusion-io's iSCSI hybrid
Editor:- January
1, 2014 - StorageReview.com
recently published
a
report on Fusion-io's
ION Data
Accelerator software - which is a key ingredient in FIO's
ioControl
box (iSCSI
hybrid
rackmount
system).
"Rolling the software out on our own server took less
than 15 minutes start to finish" said StorageReview.com ...read
the article | |
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