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Seagate to acquire LSI's
flash business for $450 million
Editor:- May 29, 2014 - Seagate today
announced
it will acquire the assets of LSI's Accelerated
Solutions Division and Flash Components Division from Avago Technologies for
$450 million in cash.
The transaction is expected to close in the 3rd quarter of calendar
year 2014, subject to regulatory approval.
Editor's comments:-
Seagate has for a long time appeared to be a bystander rather than a
cheerleader in the SSD market.
By acquiring the
SSD controller technology
which is at the heart of a significant proportion of SSD designs in the industry
- and also the 2nd largest enterprise
PCIe SSD maker (by
volume) - Seagate will come to be regarded in a different way by SSD customers,
partners and competitors.
The cost of the acquisition - seems low
compared to many past
examples in recent market history.
LSI itself paid $370 million for
SandForce in October
2011 - and you might think that in all the years of market and product
development since then - and particularly with the controller product line
having been upgraded to being an SSD drives and module business too - the
combined business should have been worth more.
But it wasn't - and
Avago - which has owned LSI's business for a few short breaths of market time -
obviously must feel it is getting a good deal.
Possible reasons for the
low valuation of LSI's SSD business (in comparison to maybe what it might have
fetched a year or so ago are:-
- LSI was latecomer to the
adaptive R/W
controller market. So that meant many SSD companies which needed this new
type of flash management technology had already made other strategic plans for
their next generation flash management roadmaps before LSI began sampling the
SF3700 in November 2013.
- There are strong competitive offerings available now in every segment of
the SSD market - and in comparison to the past when a single controller product
could effectively be competitive in a wide variety of markets - that's no longer
true.
- Software has
become an essential part of enterprise SSD offerings. Not only does it provide
essential compatibilities - but it can also add efficiencies, reliability and
performance.
LSI's enterprise software offerings were always weak
add-ons in my view - in comparison to competing products - and were tactical
sales demonstration tools rather than genuine hard core enterprise platforms.
- Rackmounts. To succeed in the traditional enterprise SSD market today -
enterprise SSD makers need to think like systems companies or become actual
systems companies. That's where
new
efficiencies come together with new architectures.
But I can't
think of a single leading SSD systems vendor today (unlike a few years ago)
who would now offer LSI's controllers as the flagship controllers in a new
high end array.
The reasons being that LSI was late to market with
adaptive R/W, late to market with
big architecture
controller design, and doesn't have a scalable software platform.) In
a way none of those valuation theories matters - but in another way they do -
because understanding LSI's weaknesses as an SSD company stretched in too many
markets takes us neatly onto - what I think could be the real synergy between
Seagate and LSI's controller business.
What's Seagate been
historically good at?
Making huge numbers of storage drives cheap and
affordable.
What has the SandForce controller design been historically
good at?
Getting into more design slots for value based enterprise and
embedded applications than any other SSD controller design.
I think
that even if Seagate disregarded any new markets - and focused only on the
high volume potential of existing
cloud infrastructure
customers and big web entities (like Google and Baidu) - who need value based
enterprise SSDs - but who are perfectly capable of designing their own software
and APIs and firmware tweaks - then Seagate could leverage the LSI SandForce
SSD roadmaps for the next several years as a business tool to establish it
as one of (several) leaders in the utility SSD
segment
of the cloud.
LSI on its own wouldn't be able to make such vast
quantities of drives at commodity prices.
Seagate on its own didn't
have the SSD IP.
But the new Seagate (with SSD IP now in its core)
can leverage that IP with its production control skills to cement new price
thresholds for value enterprise SSDs.
See also:-
hostage to the
fortunes of SSD - why big companies can't afford NOT to be in the SSD
market...
Afterthoughts (Friday May 30)
PS - Some of
the factors dampening the valuation of LSI's flash business seemed so obvious
that I didn't mention them in any of the bullet points above. But it appears
that they weren't as obvious to everyone - so here they are if you're
interested.
- Competing with your own customers.
When LSI acquired SandForce -
that introduced a new dynamic for the outlook of the combined business -
because LSI-SandForce was from that point onwards competing with many of the
companies which had previously been customers of SandForce controllers.
That
triggered plans in some of the big customer (now competitor) SSD companies to
look for alternative technology roadmaps which would level the playing field in
a future when they would be competing - at a drive level - with the controller
architecture which they had helped to establish as a de facto industry
standard.
And it also created a more favorable climate for competing
SSD controller makers who had lost out before. Such as
Marvell.
- How much are SSD companies worth?
Generally - SSD companies ain't
worth as much as they used to be.
Nearly all mainstream enterprise
SSD companies (who have been shipping products for a few years or more - as
opposed to stealthy startups) have seen their valuations dip in the past year -
due to investors realizing that the idea of any one company dominating any one
big market
segment sustainably is an illusion (for now).
That's because the
barriers to entry from new vendors are still low (due to the existence of a
very sophisticated SSD IP and parts ecosystem).
This means that
startups using new technologies at low volumes can still deliver SSDs which
are significantly cheaper to make than legacy SSD technologies - even when those
legacy SSDs are being produced in much higher production volumes. (Legacy in
this context - means anything that's more than 12 to 24 months old.)
I
suspect that the industry wide downgrade of the value of SSD companies (which
we saw last year with companies like
Fusion-io,
Violin.
Stec,
OCZ etc - for various
different reasons) will change direction - when we start to see dramatic
changes in reported revenues and profitability.
How will that happen?
I
think it depends as much on creative leadership, vision and discipline in
business models as it does on technology.
Because you can still make
money if you sell the right kind of SSD to the right kind of customer for the
right kind of purpose. (Especially if they come back soon after to buy more.)
But you can still lose money by selling an SSD that's better than it needs to
be.
And you can lose money if you over invest sales and marketing
resources by selling the right kind of SSD for the right kind of application to
a customer who won't need any more of your products for another few years
afterwards. All sounds boringly obvious business stuff doesn't it?
That's why I didn't include these add on notes in my original short version of
this post.
Another question which it's inevitable to ask - however - is
this...
What will happen to the continuing supply of SandForce SSD
controllers?
It's hard to imagine that Seagate would - from its own
self interest point of view - choose to continue supplying controllers to
such a diverse range of SSD companies indefinitely.
Users of these
controllers have been on notice that the supply outlook for these essential
chips might change ever since LSI acquired
SandForce in
January 2012.
But unlike LSI - whose main business was selling chips - Seagate's
business is selling drives - and Seagate's volume takeup of these chips (for
the reasons mentioned above) will be more than enough on its own to justify the
NRE costs - without having to sell them elsewhere.
So that may
trigger a greater sense of urgency for answers about this factor - from smaller
customers who haven't made alternative plans yet.
My guess is that if
the regulators look at this transaction - that may be one of the aspects they
will focus on - because the contiunuing supply of these controllers to smaller
SSD companies in niche markets would a good thing from the viewpoint of
competitive choice. (And it wouldn't be too onerous for Seagate to maintain
the supply for a time limited period - because Seagate's biggest SSD
competitors all have their own controllers anyway.)
Later note
added - June 4, 2014
I've been talking to a key contact in LSI's
flash business to ask if there was any official corporate statement they could
make to clarify the status of this question:- what will happen to the continuing
supply of LSI SandForce SSD controllers?
But I wasn't surprised to
learn that - despite best efforts - there is nothing more they can say about
this for now.
The reason I'm not surprised is because there are
significant external entities (regulators, customers, competitors) which could
have a bearing on the final decision and if indeed it goes ahead. So it's not
just a matter of whatever LSI and Seagate would like to do.
Hynix buys Violin's PCIe SSD product line
Editor:-
May 29, 2014 - Today in line with previous guidance signals - Violin Memory (which in
January 2013 had
been observed to tentatively dip its toes as a late entrant into the raging
torrents of the PCIe SSD
market - but which had not been regarded by me as very likely to survive
a rigorous swim)
announced
that it has sold its PCIe SSD product line to Hynix which paid $23
million in cash and assumed certain liabilities totaling $0.5 million.
Apacer will unveil new MLC-mix hybrids next week
Editor:-
May 29, 2014 - Apacer
says that next week at Computex
Taipei 2014 it will unveil a new type of
hybrid SSD
which it calls MLC-mix products in which a single SSD embeds both
MLC and SLC to extend the
lifetime by 6x and speed upto 2x compared to MLC alone.
Editor's
comments:- it's not a totally new concept. In
June 2008 -
Silicon Motion
launched SSD controllers
which supported exatcly the same idea.
Marvell samples controller for SATAe SSDs
Editor:-
May 21, 2014 - If you're designing SATA Express SSDs then Marvell today
announced
it is sampling the 1st SSD
controller specifically designed for the SATAe market - which will
enable the design of 2.5"
PCIe SSDs at costs which could be
competitive with
fast SATA SSDs.
Marvell's
88SS1083 is a 2 lane PCIe Gen2 SSD controller with transfer rates up to
1GB/s. It supports DevSleep and L1.2 PCIe low power state - to minimize power
consumption in notebook
and enterprise array
environments. Its flash management scales down to 15nm NAND.
Kaminario guarantees amplified usable capacity
Editor:-
May 20, 2014 - When I saw yesterday that Kaminario would be
talking about a
cost of around
$2,000 per usable terabyte of SSD storage in its new 5th generation K2
enterprise rackmount
launched
today - my gut feel was - this price metric must be based on some kind of
SSD utilization
amplified capacity figure - rather than the conventionally
discounted
raw storage capacity - because I know that Kaminario isn't in the
deep flash IP
controller business - and unless I've been asleep and missed something -
this kind of headline figure isn't coming from arrays of
COTS
flash drives.
So I asked the company about it - and was told that the "average
$2/GB usable cost includes data reduction with Kaminario's guaranteed effective
capacity offering (meaning they will provide customers with incremental free
hardware if their original capacity needs aren't met)."
And when
I probed again - does it apply to channel sales and well as direct sales? - I
got confirmation that indeed it does.
I think this is very
significant.
Because guarantees are the way to add weight to an SSD vendor's
convictions that they are confident about what they're claiming.
9 years ago in the
enterprise SSD market - we saw the world's first performance guarantees
being given - about raw speed claims.
And similar to that in
historic
significance - I think that
Kaminario's
K2 v5 product launch will be remembered - not for the product
specifications - but for ushering in a new era in enterprise SSD marketing -
in which the increased utilization from
software - stops being
a wishy washy averaged (sometimes you might get it, but other times you won't)
concept which sounds good in a news headline - of the type we've seen from a
lot of other vendors in recent years - and instead becomes a guaranteed figure -
like endurance - which users can learn to trust.
If Kaminario can
stand behind its usable capacity amplification claims - then other vendors
should do the same - or stop talking about promises they're not confident
enough to stand behind.
And if some vendors say - we don't know the
workload - so how can we provide a guarantee?
I'd say - get to know
your customers better - or risk losing a lot of business because the
alternatives are offering over specified, over priced systems - which work - or
under-specified, under-priced systems which might fail early.
is life really better with Plextor?
Editor:- May 20,
2014 - The paucity of serious marketing
ideas in the consumer
SSD market nowadays can be judged by the fact that Plextor America today
launched a marketing program - "Life Is Better With Plextor" -
which involves consumers signing up for a weekly lottery in which one person
each week can win a free SSD.
Editor's
comments:- I only mentioned it here because it can be amusing to witness
the silliness of technical companies when they're engaged in consumer markets.
Nimble says 200 customers have used its bundled stack
Editor:-
May 19, 2014 - Nimble
Storage today
announced
that over 200 enterprise customers have used its
SmartStack
(pre-validated reference architecture) which is centered around the company's
hybrid
storage arrays.
See also:-
hybrid array news,
rackmount SSDs
PMC blog discusses latency implications of DSP ECC IP in SSD
controllers
Editor:- May 15, 2014 -
Latency
in LDPC-based Next-Generation SSD Controllers is a new blog by Stephen Bates,
Technical Director, PMC
who says - "The variability of the LDPC decode time is a function of how
many iterations it takes to decode the data from the flash."
In
his article Stephen says that the minimum number of iterations is 1, typical
is 4 and maximum is 20.
To relate that to latency - he says assume for
sake of illustration that each iteration takes a microsecond.
Editor's
comments:- you can see how those numbers can start to stack up and make
inroads into the design of fast
SSD controllers.
That's
one of the reasons you've got so many
different generations of
flash memory circulating in the same market today.
The higher the
capacity of the SSD - the greater the economic incentive to use newer smaller
flash geometries. But those require more complex controller management (to
guarantee data
integrity) so that incurs greater design complexity and NRE.
PMC's
market is the enterprise - but these DSP flash concepts are used in industrial markets
too. In fact that's where they originated. Bu in industrial SSDs it can still
be sometimes cheaper
to deploy more expensive SLC memory in low capacity designs - due to the
simpler requirements of the associated controller technology and therefore also
lower demands for
power hold up
time too.
PS - in an earlier blog in this series - Stephen Bates
(whose PhD was in signal processing) - revisits the reasons why the
SSD market needs
to consider the design freedoms which come from using complex DSP flash IP -
and
he
gives examples of the tradeoffs. Such as 50% better
endurance
with LDPC codes using identical flash - or gaining
usable
capacity by using weaker codes.
BTW the industry changing
possibilities of these technologies for reshaping the economies of SSDs were
reviewed in my 2012 article -
Adaptive
flash care management & DSP IP in SSDs What is it? Who does it? and why?
Oracle acquires GreenBytes
Editor:- May 15, 2014 -
Oracle today
announced
it will acquire GreenBytes.
See
also:- SSD software,
SSD ASAPs
Virtium promises 4 years "no requals"
Editor:-
May 14, 2014 -Virtium
today
announced
that its new 2nd generation
industrial SSDs
(SATA 3 compatible) can deliver upto 4x the read performance of its 1st
generation
StorFly
models.
They're available in in 2.5", 1.8",
M.2, mSATA, Slim SATA, and
CFast form factors.
Commenting on the high amortized
cost per unit of
requalifying SSDs in embedded industrial markets Scott Phillips,
director of marketing at Virtium (who
recently
joined the company from HGST)
said about the issue - "With its 2nd generation StorFly SATA SSDs,
Virtium is able to guarantee that its SLC-based StorFly PE class products will
not cause a requal for at least 4 years." |
 |
Editor's comments:-
Because Virtium did such a good job a few years ago explaining to me how it was
adapting its technology roadmaps to deal with MLC - I mistakenly assumed for a
while that all the StorFly SSDs were only available with MLC inside. But I was
wrong. The new models are available with either MLC or SLC.
new report on the costs to 3D nand flash manufacturability
Editor:-
May 14, 2014 - Sometimes a good question can reveal as much about the state
of the SSD market as the answer.
There isn't always a pre-packaged
answer to many of the questions I get from thoughtful readers. And investing
the time to understand why that is so - when the question is good one - and
there should be an answer often leads to me writing new articles.
But
you'll be pleased to know that there is a packaged answer to this
question posed by Gregory Wong,
President, Forward
Insights who asks...
"What is the incremental investment
required to transition a 32 layer 3D NAND fab to 64 layers? What is the impact
on fab cycle time and manufacturing capacity?"
But you'll have to
buy his latest report -
Cost and
Investment Implications of 3D NAND (overview pdf) - to find out what it
is.
See also:-
Forward Insights - SSD
and nvm reports overview
is it time for enterprise SSD designers to reconsider RapidIO?
Editor:-
May 14, 2014 - You'd think that with all the interfaces
already in use
within the enterprise SSD
market - there wouldn't be enough of a market gap to justify introducing
yet another one. - Particularly when that interface strays across low
latency server-storage territory which is dominated by
PCIe SSDs, under
attack by memory
channel SSDs and has been flanked historically by
InfiniBand.
I
thought so too.
But in a recent article -
Do
You Really Know RapidIO? - by Eric Esteve , founder of
IPnest says - "Maybe it's
time for the server/storage industry to give a second chance for the RapidIO
protocol."
Editor's comments:- That's a bold statement -
coming as it does from someone who was involved in designing one of the first
generation PCIe controllers 10 years ago. Eric argues that the intrinsic fabric
architecture and routing support in RapidIO - would make many of the things
which architects are trying to do today - such as interconnecting large numbers
of servers and SSDs for example - easier and faster.
SanDisk and Toshiba collaborate on 3D nand fab
Editor:-
May 13, 2014 - SanDisk
and Toshiba today
announced
that they have begun work on demolishing and converting a 2D NAND fab at
Yokkaichi Operations, in Mie prefecture, Japan over to 3D capability with a
view to enabling 3D output in 2016. See also:-
flash memory
a new CMO for Fusion-io
Editor:- May 12, 2014 -
Fusion-io
today
announced
that Michael
Mendenhall (who from 2007 to 2011 was CMO at
HP) has joined Fusion-io
as executive VP and CMO.
Editor's comments:- this fills a long
standing vacuum in FIO's marketing - initially created by the
management changes a
year ago.
Being CMO at Fusion-io is one of the most important
marketing positions in the SSD industry. The whole industry looks towards
Fusion-io as an indicator of future directions in the enterprise - even its
competitors.
TrendFocus reports SSD shipments in Q1 2014
Editor:-
May 10, 2014 - According to a
research
report by TrendFocus
- the top 2 SSD companies (based on the number of drives shipped in Q1 2014)
were Samsung
and SanDisk
with 32% of the market and 26% respectively.
You can see a table
listing the other top companies in the
report
summary by StorageNewsletter.com here.
Samsung starts 3D nand production at new fab in China
Editor:-
May 9, 2014 - Samsung
announced
that its new memory fabrication line in Xi'an China - which will make 3D
V-NAND - has begun full-scale manufacturing operations.
Another petabytes shipment snapshot of enterprise flash
Editor:-
May 9, 2014 - A recent blog - in ArchitectingIT
- says that 3 leading vendors shipped a sum total of over 50PB of
rackmount SSDs in
Q1 2014 - with HDS
- apparently having shipped more flash capacity than either EMC or Pure Storage
according to estimates by the blog's author Chris Evans.
Editor's
comments:- How does this compare to other vendors? and to other times?
See Petabyte SSD
Milestones from Storage History.
Another context is this.
If
and when Skyera
ships just 40U of its fully populated upcoming
skyEagle (in a single
quarter later this year) that would be more flash capacity than anyone in the
above list. (Although they should all be shipping more too if you believe
market forecasts.)
Enterprise
flash capacity - on its own - is a crude and meaningless measure. (Unless -
I suppose - you're the company which sold the
chips or the boxes.) The
true business
value of enterprise flash depends on how fast it is,
where it's located in the
datacenter architecture and how well it has been integrated to leverage
the application architecture.
"SATA inside" SanDisk's ULLtraDIMMs
Editor:-
May 8, 2014 - Today I learned some new details about the architecture in SanDisk's
implementation of
memory channel
SSDs by watching a video -
SanDisk ULLtraDIMM
Architecture and Design Technology - which was recorded at the recent
Storage Field Day event
(April 25, 2014).
Inside each flash DIMM are 2x SATA CloudSpeed SSDs
which connect to the DDR3 interface via a Diablo designed bridge
chip which has something on the order of "megabytes" of buffer memory
inside.
That gives a much better basis for
understanding the
performance limits of these devices.
And it confirms why you only
start to see noteworthy performance from them after installing 3, 4 or
more modules.
However
- despite the "SATA inside" limited nature of this 1st generation
memory channel storage design - the performance - aggregated at a block level -
results in a usable write latency envelope which
IBM has verified to be in
a
consistently lower
latency category than most leading
PCIe SSDs.
So
- if you're thinking long term - and roadmaps - it's reasonable to assume that
if a 2nd or 3rd generation of MCS flash DIMM SSD could abandon the "SATA
inside" and use instead a
large
architecture flash controller with a native memory array optimized type of
bridge interface - then the gaps between what MCS can offer - compared to PCIe
latency - could widen.
Later:- Diablo's follow on product -
the Memory1
didn't suffer from the above bottleneck. You can see the
benchmarks for
Memory1 here.
By the way in this 52 minute video I also
learned 2 interesting details about
SanDisk's CloudSpeed SSDs
which I didn't know before:-
- SanDisk's Guardian technology doesn't perform scheduled data integrity
checks to detect silent errors for data at rest.
The stated reason
being that this would eat into
endurance. -
And the implied assumption being that SanDisk thinks this type of activity is
best determined by the system designer. So - if you design these SATA SSDs
into a storage array - then you'll have to take responsibility for that aspect
of long term data health in your own software. See also:-
memory channel
SSD news and articles
Intel invests in Maxta
Editor:- May 7, 2014 - Intel
Capital was one of the leading investors in a $25 million series B investment
in Maxta which
was
announced
today. Other investors included Tenaya Capital and Andreessen Horowitz.
Editor's
comments:- these investors aren't the only ones who believe Yoram Novick's
claim that the company he founded is markedly different to the other 95% or so
of SSD software startups.
A lot of you were sufficiently curious too - which elevated Maxta into the
Top SSD Companies list
in Q1 2014.
See also:-
Maxta case studies and white papers,
new trends in
SSD boxes, VCs in SSDs
and storage
Avago completes acquisition of LSI
Editor:- May 6,
2014 - Avago Technologies Limited
today
announced
it has completed its acquisition of LSI an all-cash
transaction valued at approximately $6.6 billion.
The acquisition
creates a highly diversified semiconductor market leader with approximately $5
billion in projected annual revenues.
Avago believes the acquisition of LSI repositions Avago as a leader in
the enterprise storage market. The acquisition also expands Avago's product
offerings and brings system-level expertise in its wired infrastructure market.
LSI will operate as a wholly-owned indirect subsidiary of Avago and
will continue to conduct business under the LSI name.
Editor's
comments:- A quick way to graps what Avago is all about is to view their
news page.
Although
LSI's SSDs and controllers already operate in more markets than you can easily
count - it's interesting to speculate what integrating Avago's connectivity
technologies with LSI's enterprise flash controller SSD expertise will do
for the SSD market.
My guess is that it will become easier, cheaper
and less risky for systems designers to place SSD functionality anywhere
they like without having to dive deeply into the interface details.
EMC acquires memory channel SSD in a box company DSSD
Editor:-
May 5, 2014 - EMC
has acquired a stealth mode rackmount SSD company - DSSD
- it was announced
today.
Products based on the new DSSD architecture are expected to be
available in 2015.
Editor's comments:- an informative and
entertaining article about this can be seen on
Barrons.com.
It
sounds like the DSSD product will implement a large directly addressable (by
PCIe) memory space - based on a transparent
RAM cache flash
memory tiering
scheme and will offer latencies similar to
memory channel
SSDs - but with the capacity difference being that you can pack more
capacity into a box than in a bunch of DDR3 DIMMs.
It hearkens back to
the original big shared memory in a box connected by PCIe of
Violin's first product
- the Violin 1010 Memory
Appliance - which was launched back in 2007.
Although that was
pure RAM - and
expensive. And
enterprise users in those days weren't as
educated as they
are today. That meant Violin had to go back and redesign the product to include
a fibre-channel front end -
to make it fit in with the market idea of what an enterprise SSD box should
really look like. And that product also came in at the tail end of the
RAM SSD market - in the
year before new flash
controller architectures enabled SSD makers (including Violin) to displace
low to mid range SSD boxes with pure flash.
And before Violin's product
- in 1994 - Texas Memory
Systems was shipping a product called the SAM-2000 (Shared Access Memory) -
which enabled a bunch of different computers (even with different OS and
internal busses) to share the same memory at low microsend latencies and bus
throughputs.
There's an argument for saying that Violin already offers
something similar now to what EMC hopes to ship next year - in the shape of
Violin's Windows
Flash Array (WFA). Except that the 1st generation WFA uses GbE as the server
clustering fabric. But my guess is that it would be easy for Violin to offer
other variations with lower internal latency - to connect the CPUs to its
VIMMs
- if they thought enough customers would buy it.
And
IBM can already do
something similar (to Violin) with its X6 architecture.
The
limitations in IBM's technology are that the 1st generation of eXFlash DIMMs
(designed by SanDisk
and Diablo) are greedy
when it comes to power consumption. That means legacy server motherboards
don't have enough current capacity routed to the DIMMs to enable you to fill
them all with these modules. That's easy to change, however by adding more
copper in the motherboards and increasing the air flow in the box.
If
EMC offers the DSSD as a product which is unbundled from the brand of server -
then it might find a niche market for it.
But there are so many
different ways of tackling the same problem (such as enabling
PCIe SSD fabric from
PLX and
A3CUBE, and
software defined
storage, not to mention what's the PCIe interface for in
Skyera's new box)
that it may already be a crowded market by the time EMC has anything to ship.
See also:-
Are you ready to
rethink enterprise RAM? | |
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| Megabyte loves reading news | |
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| the top 3 SSD topics in
May 2014 |
The top 3 topics viewed and followed up by
readers of StorageSearch.com in May were:-
- PCIe SSDs
- memory
channel SSDs
- hybrid storage
arrays
The surprise here wasn't the #1 topic.
PCIe SSDs have been the
#1 form factor on this site since 2009.
And it wasn't the #2 topic
either.
Because
memory channel
SSDs and their place in the market were the main topic in my
home page blog in May, and there
was a lot of news coverage about MCS too.
Many readers are still
trying to figure out whether this new form factor should occupy a permanent
place in their thinking about enterprise SSD accelerators.
My view is
- yes - despite the lack of software support which you get in any new product
and some quirks in the implementation of the 1st generation product. It was
weird to see it's got a SATA bridge inside. And it consumes way more power
than most standard DIMMs. But despite those factors (due to the speed of
getting the design to market) the MCS concept performs well - when you've got
enough of them. Which tells you that next generation products - with leaner
internals - have plenty of headroom to perform better.
The real
surprise for me was at #3.
This was the highest ever ranking for
hybrid storage arrays - a subject which we've had a focused directory on since
the first
auto-tiering / caching
appliances shipped 5 years ago.
I had
a
conversation about this recently with Rob Commins, VP Marketing,
Tegile - which
I'll write
about soon.
The most interesting thing I learned about Tegile
didn't have anything to do with the
new
products they launched this week BTW. | | |
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"If these new memories
really are as good as the claims, why are we not seeing them in production
applications today? The answer appears to be inertia" - says
Brian Bailey, Technology
Editor - Semiconductor Engineering
Dave Lazovsky,
CEO of Intermolecular expands on
this by saying - NAND flash is a $30B industry that has tens of billions of
dollars in capital infrastructure that would need to be retooled. The big 4
players represent 95% of the market and they have a lot of existing investment.
The entire cost equation is CapEx, so they need to milk the tail of the revenues
as long as they can." |
| Big Memory Shift
Ahead (May 22, 2014) | | |
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| Decloaking hidden segments
in the enterprise |
Editor:- May 28, 2014 - StorageSearch.com today published
a new article -
Decloaking
hidden segments in the enterprise for rackmount SSDs
Some of the
world's leading SSD marketers have confided in me they know from
their own customer anecdotes that there are many segments for enterprise
flash arrays which aren't listed or even hinted at in standard models of
the enterprise market.
Many of these missing market segments don't
even have names.
Hey - that means SSD-world is like a map of the
US before Lewis and Clark.
If you're a
VC should this make
you anxious or happy?
If you're a user - maybe that's why no one is
delighting you in the way you think you deserve.
That's what led me to
write my new
article.
See also:-
rackmount SSDs,
SSD silos,
market research | | |
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stories from SSD news in May
months gone by
2013 - Micron
samples hot swap 1.4TB 2.5" PCIe SSDs
2012 - Buffalo puts MRAM into SSD
cache
2011 -
SanDisk acquires Pliant (a SAS SSD company)
2010 - SandForce
launches branding program
2009 - Unity Semi
says CMOx will replace nand flash
2008 - Mtron
supplies NASA first terabyte SSD in Space
2006 - Samsung
unveils world's first hybrid for notebooks
2004 - RamSan
rackmount SSD is IBM TotalStorage Proven |
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" There are 2 ways to
make memory work in space.
One is to invent better semiconductor processes to make the memory
cell less susceptible to direct radiation. ... these methods require redesign
of the memory chips and calls for new process technologies that are not widely
used for memory chips - which in itself presents a risk in production cost and
scalability when memory technology changes.
The second way is to use off-the-self memory parts.
NASA
Engineers have found that every memory chip exhibits slightly different
characteristic under radiation environment.
...Therefore, the most
economical way is to test-and-select. NASA decided to use Off-the-self parts
even in the International Space Station. This is obviously for cost reason and
to allow upgrade paths..."
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| from Tanisys' blog -
the
effects of radiation on SSDs for space applications. (May 2014) | | |
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