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| leading the way to the
new storage frontier |
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PCIe
SSDs
SSD
history
Top
SSD Companies in Q3 - 2014
NV DIMMs - low
latency flash SSDs
NV DIMMs - flash backed
DRAM hybrids
decloaking
hidden segments in the enterprise
10 key SSD
ideas which became clearer in 2014 |
| .. |
GUC announces new low power
SSD IP portfolio
Editor:- September 25, 2014 - Global Unichip
today
rolled
out an expanded interconnect low power IP portfolio for ASICs targeting SSD
applications.
The expansion covers ultra low power PCIe 3/4 PHY,
DDR3/4, LPDDR3/4 CTRL/PHY and ONFi4.0 IO/PHY. IP based on the 28HPM/HPC
processes in the expanded portfolio are available now, while 16nm macros will be
available in Q4 of this year.
Among all NAND applications Global
Unichip says SSD is the fastest growing with the Data Center and Enterprise
segments showing the greatest potential. GUC is meeting that demand with a
complete low power IP portfolio for SSD controllers, including NAND I/O (ONFI,
Toggle), DDR I/F (DDR3/4, LPDDR3/4) and Serdes I/F (PCIe-3/4, SATA3/SAS3).
Samsung mass produces 3TB 3D 10 DWPD PCIe SSDs
Editor:-
September 25, 2014 - Samsung
today announced it has started mass producing 3.2 TB NVMe
PCIe SSDs (HHHL)
based on its 3D flash memory
technology, for use in enterprise systems.
The
new NVMe PCIe SSD, SM1715 provides a sequential R/W speeds upto 3GB/s and
2.2GB/s respectively with
endurance
rated at 10 DWPD for 5
years.
Editor's comments:-
In March 2014 -
reporting on a conversation I had with
FMJ - I alerted readers to
their characterization of 3D for
industrial SSDs
- and the indication that endurance (due to better intrinsic materials) was2-3x
better than 2D at the same cell geometry.
Micron's enterprise SSD revenue grew 79% QOQ
Editor:-
September 25, 2014 - In its Q4 earning conference call today Micron said that about
66% to 75% of its nand flash had gone into client SSDs - with the remainder
being enterprise. However Micron also said its enterprise SSD revenue was up
79% quarter-on-quarter. ...full
transcript on SeekingAlpha.com
Diablo countersues Netlist
Editor:- September 25, 2014 - Diablo announced today
that is has filed a lawsuit against Netlist for unfair
business practices that violate Diablo's IP rights.
This appears to be
a countermeasure to 2 earlier lawsuits initiated by Netlist against Diablo -
which were widely reported by the SSD related press in
January 2014.
Today
- Diablo reiterates that its
Memory
Channel Storage (DDR3/4 form factor
and interface compatible flash SSD) is a new and innovative architecture
that neither infringes upon, nor misappropriates any Netlist IP rights. And
Diablo argues that its MCS-based products and the
Netlist
HyperCloud DIMM (high
density DRAM) - which were the cited products in Netlist's earlier legal
moves - are designed to serve different purposes and are not
interchangeable.
Diablo says the contract between the 2 companies (which has been
mentioned in the press) clearly assigns legal ownership of the implementation
IP in the HyperCloud chipset to Diablo. As a result, Diablo is seeking damages
for breach of contract for Netlist's attempt to usurp the company's IP rights.
"We have been very patient throughout this entire process and it
is now time for us to share our side of the story" said Riccardo
Badalone, CEO and Co-founder of Diablo Technologies. "We will
demonstrate definitively that products based on the Memory Channel Storage
architecture do not use any Netlist IP."
rackmount SSDs - new reports from Evaluator Group
Editor:-
September 24, 2014 - Evaluator Group
today
announced
it's expanding its comparison report coverage (priced from around $2,750 for
IT end-users) related to
rackmount SSD and
hybrid array
vendors.
The latest addition to EV's research area are product
analyses for 15 vendors, including:
Cisco,
EMC,
HDS,
HP,
IBM,
Kaminario,
NetApp,
Nimble,
Nimbus,
Pure Storage,
SanDisk,
SolidFire,
Tegile,
Tintri and
Violin.
"Over
the next 3 years Evaluator Group expects Solid State Storage Systems to be the
architecture adopted for primary storage," said Camberley Bates,
Managing Partner & Analyst at Evaluator Group. "Performance to reduce
latency and improve consistency,
along with reliability
and efficiency
functionality
will drive this change. It is important IT end users understand the trade-offs
of design and technical implementation to best suit their needs."
Using
the
Solid
State Evaluation Guide to understand the critical technology characteristics
EV says IT end users can clearly identify their requirements and priorities. The
Solid State Comparison Matrix allows for side-by-side comparison of product
specifications and capabilities. Evaluator Group guides IT end users through the
process with product reviews and expertise on managing and conducting a Proof of
Concept. Evaluator Group Solid State Storage Systems coverage includes products
specifically designed to exploit the characteristics of all solid state
deployment.
What will you be getting?
EV is offering a
free
evaluation copy of their report for the IBM FlashSystem to people who
sign up for it.
Editor's comments:- with so many different
architectural roles
for enterprise SSDs and
different
user preferences - it's unrealistic to suppose that any simple side by side
product comparisons will suit all permutations of user needs. But having said
that - any reliable information which assists
user education and
comprehension into SSD arrays is a good thing.
Some flash array
vendors - realizing the futility of expecting that users will understand what
their products do and how they will interact with the
bottlenecks
and demands of user installations and workloads - have instead opted to
side-step these delay laden hard user selection quandries -
which are exaggerated by
the concerns of getting it wrong - by instead offering new risk
delineated pricing models - as described in my article -
Exiting
the Astrological Age of Enterprise SSD Pricing.
See also:-
playing the
enterprise SSD box riddle game,
storage market research,
what do
enterprise SSD users want?
Microsoft's SSD-aware VMs - discussed on InfoQ
Editor:-
September 24, 2014 - There are now so many
enterprise SSD software
companies that keeping track of them all is a little like tallying
2.5" SSD makers -
a tedious chore -which in most cases isn't worth the bother.
Nevertheless
- SSD-centric software
is strategically
important - and some vendors are more important than others - despite having
been latecomers in the
enterprise flash
wars .
One such company is Microsoft.
A
news story today - Microsoft
Azure Joins SSD Storage Bandwagon on InfoQ
- discusses Microsoft's D-Series SSD-aware VMs - and places this in the context
of other products from well known sources.
The blog's author - Janakiram MSV says "One
important aspect of SSD based VMs on Azure is that they are not persistent. Data
stored on these volumes cannot survive the crash or termination of virtual
machines. This is different from both Amazon EC2 and Google Compute Engine,
which offer persistent SSDs. On Azure, customers have to ensure that the data
stored on the SSD disks is constantly backed up to Azure blob storage or other
VMs." ...read
the article
CoreRise discloses who it's talking to - about SSD IP
Editor:-
September 24, 2014 - I've noticed some
news updates recently from CoreRise.
Viewed
singly the content appears lightweight and more like tweets than the
usual kind of news I would write about on this page - but when viewed as a
total set they give a useful picture of technology directions at CoreRise.
In the space of single week CoreRise reported visits from
Seagate (re SF3700
controllers), Micron (re
flash memory), SMI
(re controllers) and also JMicron
(re controllers).
CoreRise also made a refreshingly candid comment
about its own attitude to the kind of reference designs which
SSD controller makers
typically offer SSD oems as a quick to market route to market (in which the SSD
maker simply takes the design from the controller maker as a ready made IP
solution and simply just adds their own memory.
CoreRise said that
due to quality considerations - and its own expertise - "as a rule,
CoreRise never uses the reference design due to potential defects. In the
past CoreRise has found critical bugs in almost every such solution."
Diablo is the #1 SSD company being followed up in recent weeks
Editor:-
September 23, 2014 - StorageSearch.com
doesn't publish a regular list of the Top SSD Companies searched for by readers
in the 1st 3 weeks of September.
That's because
7+ years of Top SSD
company tracker company history has demonstrated that 3 month (quarterly)
sampling periods are more reliable (than 3 weeks).
But if we did - a
3 week tracker - the #1 company this month would be - Diablo.
In
particular readers are looking at
Diablo's FMS
presentation (pdf) from which I extracted these key features in earlier
memory channel
SSDs news coverage in
August.
- Diablo's converged memory architecture (flash tiered with DRAM) is planned
to support 700 million random cachelines / sec.
- Latency of each cacheline is about 48 nanoseconds.
- Diablo's NanoCommit supports byte addressable small writes to flash with
high transaction rates and the ability to mirror the DRAM contents to
persistent storage.
- The combination of technologies would enable something like a 1U server
with 25TB of converged memory.
Editor's comments:- I only
mention it - because of the scale of interest involved.
One reason may
be that - as you'll see in the next news story below - having SSDs located in a
DIMM socket in one server - no longer precludes that very same data being
accessed by another server as if it were just a locally installed PCIe SSD.
BTW
- A3CUBE is #2
in September reader followups so far - and this is due to the story below.
A3CUBE - first US customer shipments soon
Editor:-
September 18, 2014 - earlier this week
A3CUBE
effectively announced
imminent US customer shipments of its PCIe connected shared reflective memory
fabric - with the unveiling of the system software which works with its
previously announced RONNIEE Express platform.
The
Fortissimo
Foundation software (overview pdf) is the new management and OS software
which enables application agnostic hardware based memory synchronization of
DRAM memory blocks across multiple servers (scalable to thousands) which are
connected via a PCIe fabric with worst case access times under 1 micro-second
(which includes operating system and software overhead). This enables access to
all the resources in the cluster as if they were local.
Editor's
comments:- Before talking to Emilio Billi,
Founder - A3CUBE last week about the new Fortissimo - 3 ideas popped into my
head.
- modeling the application performance
I realized that in
the absence of any other data (at this stage of the product's life cycle)- a
good predictive analog for the usability of this remote shared memory system
would be Diablo's memory
channel SSD architecture.
The key difference being that the 1st
generation MCS has typical latencies around 3 to 5 microseconds (compared to
800nS RONNIEE Express), and MCS is operating with flash - whereas RE operates
with DRAM. But as a first order approximation -my thinking was that any app
which works well with MCS in a local server - will work just as well - or better
- in a remote server connected by RE.
- the importance of strategic software standard support
My
guess is that for many smaller developers of large memory architecture systems
- SanDisk's ZetaScale
(and related) APIs will come to be regarded as a "safe" hardware
independent SSD software platform for flash. So - if it was easy to integrate
A3CUBE's Fortissimo / RE within such APIs - that would provide a gateway to a
much bigger market.
- beyond legacy storage and SSD fabrics
Obviously to get
business now - A3CUBE has to demonstrate that their products can be useful and
competitive when used with existing storage and SSD installations and
architectures.
But as more of the installed base moves towards
new dynasty
(always intended to include SSDs at the outset), and in the next 5 to 10 years
as we see the current new generations of "software as something useful in
an SSD server" - give way to new
SSD software
ecosystems - developed by stealth mode companies like
Primary Data -
whose products don't even exist yet (except as tantalizing
investment objects and
patent applications) - I could see that the A3CUBE style of connection - would
still fit in well - because the ability to replicate and synchronize
remote memory in multiple servers at latencies which are closer to hardware than
software - isn't going to go oyt of fashion. So I mentioned all those
things to Emilio when we spoke. And this is what I learned.
- Emilio said Diablo was one of the first external companies to recognize the
work that A3CUBE was doing. And he said that Diablo's APIs should work
easily with A3CUBE's platform (just as many other memory intensive apps).
And
- as I speculated before our conversation - the ability to seamlessly converge
remote low latency RAM with remote flash across an almost unlimited set of
servers - is a mind boggling ecosystem enabler. Because we should now view SSD
memory products which do useful things locally in a single server - as simply a
subset of a continuum which can span racks and cabinets - and change not only
cost dynamics - but the very determination of what type of apps are possible.
- Emilio said a significant bottleneck in all previous fabric systems was
the mechanism of metadata synchronization.
That's traditionally done
in software - and no matter how many hundreds or thousands of servers you have
in your installation - the scalability of those systems ultimately comes back to
the software mechanism of how fast 2 servers can replicate or share a set of
data.
In A3CUBE's RE platform - the ability to broadcast an identical
content of shared memory across hundreds or thousands of connected nodes is
done in silicon.
- re reliability? - I put it to Emilio that everything was being staked on
the reliability of the RE platform - and I asked more about that.
Emilio
said that the Fortissimo / RE system can be configured to drop back to an
ethernet fabric if the core RE fails - but if budget allows - then it can fall
back to another RE. In neither event do you lose data or access to data. A3CUBE
has been collecting reliability data from their early access systems - and will
publish more about that later.
- re when can customers order these systems?
Emilio said that the
first production system is already scheduled for delivery to a US customer next
month.
So to my way of looking at it - the general availability
issue just seems to be related to how many of the software features are nice to
have versus essential. That will depend on what the applications are.
- re my other points - Emilio said that legacy big memory software platforms
are already supported by Fortissimo (see their site for more details) and we
found a lot to agree about re the other things I mentioned above.
Seagate announces strategic technology agreements with Baidu
Editor:-
September 17, 2014 - Seagate
today
announced
it has signed a strategic cooperation agreement with Baidu,
China's largest web services firm.
Under the agreement, Baidu will give priority to Seagate products when
considering components for all Baidu servers and storage facilities. In return
Seagate will give priority to Baidu when providing enterprise storage products
and relevant support, as well as maintain a dedicated engineering team for
Baidu.
Editor's comments:- This is a very significant
business announcement for Seagate. But it shouldn't come as any surprise - as
the destinies of the companies were already set on a natural convergence of
interests course which only needed the missing part of the IP jigsaw (SSDs) to
complete the required harmony.
Here below is a verbatim quote from
my coverage of Seagate's acquisition of LSI's SSD business in
May 2014.
"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."
See also:-
The big market impact
of SSD dark matter,
Decloaking
hidden segments in the enterprise for rackmount SSDs
Silicon Motion has fastest UHS-II SD card controller
Editor:-
September 17, 2014 - Silicon Motion
today introduced
the SM2704 which the company says is the world's fastest single-channel
UHS-II SD card
controller solution (aimed at the professional photography and video
recording market) with a maximum R/W read speed of up to 280MB/s and 260MB/s
respectively.
"Silicon Motion is the #1 merchant supplier of
UHS-I/II card controllers, which are the majority of our overall SD card
controller sales" said Wallace Kou,
President and CEO of Silicon Motion.
See also:-
SSD controllers,
consumer SSDs
Maxta appoints new VP of business development
Editor:-
September 17, 2014 - Maxta
today
announced
the appointment of Jim
Fitzgerald as its VP of business development and OEM sales. Fitzgerald
joins Maxta from Nexenta
where he was VP of business development.
another auspicious design win for ULLtraDIMM
Editor:-
September 16, 2014 - SanDisk
today
announced
that its ULLtraDIMM (memory channel SSD)
has been selected by Huawei
for use in its RH8100 V3 servers.
Huawei is ranked the top server
supplier for cloud and
mobility in China - by Sino-Bridge
Consulting.
Editor's comments:- Since the
January 2014
announcement that IBM was
using ULLtraDIMM SSDs in some high end servers - there haven't been many
conspicuously auspicious design win announcements like today's Huawei story.
One reason is that IBM had a head start on the market - having worked
with Diablo for years to
refine the MCS architecture and software APIs.
Another reason is that
the 1st generation ULLtraDIMMs apparently guzzled more electrical power than
modern RAM DIMMs even
though they were still within the permitted power envelope according to industry
standards.
This means that in order to support arrays of them in a
server design (and indeed you do need arrays to get
meaningful
performance beyond the PCIe SSD level) requires a redesign of the copper
power tracking on the motherboard. You can't just plug large numbers of
ULLtraDIMMs into any old server without analyzing the thermal consequences.
Silverton Consulting interview with Pure Storage
Editor:-
September 16, 2014 - Until now Pure Storage
hasn't said enough about its software or SSD architecture - which has been a
big negative as far I've been concerned.
Plugging that product data
deficit - the company's Chief Technical Evangelist - Vaughn Stewart recently
shared his thoughts in a podcast interview -
GreyBeards
talks all-flash storage with Pure Storage (podcast) published on Silverton Consulting - from
which this quote is taken.
"Vaughn provides a good rational as to
why we haven't seen any Pure Storage SPC-1/SPC-2 benchmarks, mainly because SPC
will not audit storage that uses data reduction."
Editor's
comments:- I haven't listened to it yet - because I don't have itunes on my
work PC and have other things competing for 45 minutes of my time. (Written
documents are more productive.) But I mention it here - because Pure Storage
has been 1 of the top 5 companies which readers have been searching for this
month - so I think that maybe a big news story may break soon.
how to configure Micron SATA SSDs for VSAN as a lower cost and
faster alternative to SAS HDDs in a Dell PowerEdge
Editor:-
September 12, 2014 - Micron
today published a new blog -
VSAN
Demo 2014: A How-To Guide - which gives a top level configuration summary
of a recent benchmark demo it ran at VMWorld.
Micron's introduction
says "Our primary goal was to demonstrate best-in-class VSAN performance
and show how that compared to a standard VSAN configured with SAS HDDs. One of
the most interesting aspects of our configuration was that our M500 client
(cheap SATA) SSDs were actually less expensive than the SAS 10K HDDs (in the
comparison system)." ...read
the article
Editor's comments:- An interesting thing
(for me) is that - for reasons explained in the article - Micron configured
VSAN to see the M500 SSDs as HDDs.
See also:-
SSD software,
How will the hard
drive market fare... in a solid state storage world?
Later:-
- BTW 4 days after the above post - Micron
launched
the M600
SATA SSD family - a low power (150mW typ), range using 16nm flash - and
available in M.2,
mSATA and
2.5" form factors.
Seagate launches new improved Nytro PCIe SSDs
Editor:-
September 10, 2014 - Seagate
today
launched
2 new PCIe SSDs -
which are based on the SSD product lines and brand assets of the recently
acquired SSD business of LSI.
- the
Nytro
XP6302 is a HHHL, gen 3 PCIe SSD - which provides up to 1.75 TB of
usable eMLC capacity with 200 microseconds average latency, and 295K/79K
R/W IOPS
(8KB) and rated for 0.9 DWPD
(approx) write
endurance for 5 years. .
- the
Nytro
XP6210 is a FHHL gen 2 PCIe SSD with 1.86TB usable 19nm cMLC
capacity, with 50 microseconds average latency 185K/120K R/W IOPS (8KB),
and rated at 1.6 DWPD
(approx) write
endurance for 5 years.
Dell uses Avago's 12Gb/s SAS chips in new RAID systems
Editor:-
September 10, 2014 - Avago Technologies
today
announced
that Dell has
selected Avago's 12Gb/s SAS technology (recently acquired from
LSI) for use in
RAID controllers in Dell's new PowerEdge Servers. See also:-
SAS SSDs,
RAID systems,
storage glue chips
Seagate reports low take up of hybrid drives
Editor:-
September 10 , 2014 - Seagate
today
announced
that it has shipped its 10 millionth solid-state hybrid hard drive (SSHD).
Seagate
says it has experienced rising demand over the last 2 years for these
solutions that offer the speed of SSDs combined with the industry's highest
storage capacities.
Editor's comments:- The low take up of
Seagate's hybrid drives for notebooks - which are 10x smaller than equivalent
SSD shipments - rather than (as Seagate must have hoped when they launched these
products 10x bigger) shows that StorageSearch.com's original assessment about
the flaws in the concept (reported on these news pages in April 2005) were
correct.
At that time I pointed to the segmental shrinking
acceptability of the integrated hybrid drive concept concept which my
analysis suggested was due to the inflexibility of having to fix the ratio of
flash to magnetic media when the drive is made rather than being able to
adapt and optimize these ratios of capacity and performance at the system
level. The all in one hybrid also precludes optimum integration of the caching
regimes with the various OSes.
Having said that - a niche market is
better than no market. And the recent acquisition of LSI's SSD business -
which gives Seagate control of the
SandForce SSD controller
family - will give Seagate the leverage to grab a sizable chunk of the
notebook SSD market - if it chooses to use that leverage.
OCZ samples hot swap, fast 2.5" NVMe SSDs
Editor:-
September 9, 2014 - OCZ
announced
that this month it will begin sampling a new
2.5" hot
swappable enterprise PCIe SSD - the Z-Drive 6000 - a native PCIe 3.0
NVMe 1.1 solution - which the company says "provides industry-leading
IOPS per dollar".
It has a SFF-8639 connector, internal
RAID,
power loss
data protection, "consistent low
latency", and encryption.
OCZ also unveiled a new
SATA SSD aimed at
customers in
hyperscale and
cloud markets - the
Saber 1000 - which uses OCZ's Barefoot 3 controller and
Toshiba's
19nm nand flash memory.
Editor's comments:- Although OCZ
demonstrated the SSD industry's first working 3.5" PCIe SSD prototype 4
years ago - in August
2010 - the company didn't follow through to establish an early lead in its
natural successor - the 2.5" enterprise PCIe market.
The main
reason for that loss of momentum was financial problems at OCZ which for a
few years weighed against introducing new products which didn't have
immediate profitable markets.
Now, however, with OCZ having been
almost a year as a Toshiba group company - the small form factor enterprise
NVMe market looks like a natural fit for OCZ - as an extension of its long
running conventional form factor PCIe SSD accelerator business and SAS SSD
product lines.
HGST announces 2nd generation clustering software for FlashMAX
PCIe SSDs
Editor:- September 9, 2014 - HGST today
announced
a new improved version of the
high availability
clustering capability previously available in the
PCIe SSD product line
acquired last year from Virident.
HGST's
Virident Space
allows clustering of up to 128 servers and 16 PCIe storage devices to deliver
one or more shared volumes of high performance flash storage with a total usable
capacity of more than 38TB.
HGST says its Virident HA provides a "high-throughput,
low-latency synchronous replication across servers for data residing on FlashMAX
PCIe devices. If the primary server fails, the secondary server can
automatically start a standby copy of your application using the secondary
replica of the data."
For more details see -
HGST
Virident Software 2.0 (pdf)
Editor's comments:- This
capability had already been demonstrated last year - and
ESG reported on the
technology in January
2014.
But at that time - the clustering product called vShare -
was restricted to a small number of servers - and the data access fabric was
restricted to Infiniband
only.
With the rev 2.0 software - the number of connected devices has
increased - and users also have the lower cost option of using
Ethernet as an alternative
supported fabric.
StorageSearch.com updates 10 key SSD ideas in 2014
Editor:-
September 2, 2014 - StorageSearch.com today published a new home page
blog - 10
key SSD ideas which emerged and clarified in 2014.
Yeah - I know
it's not January 2015 yet - but it already feels like enough big SSD changes
have happened this year already to make an end of year type of round up
article not only desirable but imperative. ...read
the article
Seagate completes acquisition of LSI's SSD business
Editor:-
September 2, 2014 - Seagate
today
announced
it has completed its previously announced acquisition of the assets of LSI's Accelerated
Solutions Division and Flash Components Division from Avago Technologies.
"There is a growing opportunity for mobile and enterprise
flash-based storage solutions, which is why we're excited about this strategic
technology acquisition," said Steve
Luczo, Seagate Chairman and CEO.
"Integrating LSI's
Enterprise PCIe flash and SSD controller products, and its engineering
capabilities into Seagate's leading storage technology portfolio and product
development will expand our ability to meet a broader base of customers' needs
and drive new revenue opportunities."
| |
| . |
| SSD news today |
| . |
9 years before
In
September 2005 - SimpleTech (STEC) launched the world's first dual interface
SSD. At launch time the Zeus Dual Interface SSD, with both a USB and SATA
interface, offered capacities up to 192GB in a 3.5-inch form factor, and
sustained read/write rates of 60 MBytes per second. |
| SSD market
history | | |
| . |
|
| |
| .. |
 |
| Megabyte loves reading news | |
|
.. |
|
 |
|
. |
|
| DRAM SSD
interfaces and PCIe fabrics are hotting up the top storage searches |
Editor:- October 1, 2014 - Total
SSD article views on StorageSearch.com
grew 5% year on year in September 2014- despite all the changes in
Google algorithms and increased competition in the SSD market reporting space.
But what have readers actually been looking at?
I'll be
reporting on the 30th quarterly
Top SSD Companies
later this month. That involves a lot of work, cross checking and writing
associated articles. All of which takes time. But what I can reveal today are
these observations - based on reader metrics.
- In Q3 2014 -
Memory Channel
SSDs became the 2nd most popular SSD form factor which readers followed up
in articles and news stories. (#1 - in case you can't remember - has been -
since 2009 - PCIe SSDs)
- In September 2014 - the 3 SSD related companies which our readers were
reading about most were:-
#1 - Diablo (DDR3/4 flash
technology)
#2 - A3CUBE
(PCIe memory fabric) and
#3 - Fusion-io (no
introduction required) What does that signify?
It won't come
any surprise to long term readers that there are still significant changes
coming in SSD enabled data server architecture.
Having become
accustomed to the idea that low latency flash inside servers has become an
essential part of the job description of any multi-user enterprise server - and
being offered a rich variety of competing alternative ways to bind CPUs and
storage with SSDs by the SSD
software market - the next natural questions for users and applications
developers to ask are these:-
- why do we have such low limits being set in directly addressible low
latency memory capacity?
- why should the performance in a single server box still dictate the
ultimate bottleneck
perfomance limits for critical data integrity and synchonization house keeping
tasks in strategic applications - when we have access to thousands of servers?
- why are our most expensive and fastest SSD enabled servers and storage
systems being forced to use different software to the cheaper ones we use in
other locations?
The roadmap vision I'm seeing emerge from
enterprise SSD developments in 2014 - is that while oems and users are being
offered more choices in form factors and flash memory types - each of which
adds to the raw confusion of which one is best to use - the mission statement
for the software developers and fabric enablers - or those who want to please
their investors - will
be to create SSDcentric platforms which enable these disparate pieces to be seen
as interoperable subsets of a bigger
continuum architecture
- in which users can move freely across wide cost/performance boundaries without
hitting walls which restrict their freedom to expand in any direction they want
to go.
But it will get more complicated than that.
Just as
early modern SSDs had to interoperate with legacy software and data storage in
order to justify their costs - future SSD software developers will have to look
at the messy patchwork of SSD accelerated servers and SSD SAN storage which
are being installed today as part of their future "legacy problem".
Seen from that angle - some solutions in the enterprise SSD jigsaw
puzzle box today - already seem to have better longevity prospects and
opportunities for future upcycling than others. | | |
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| advertising SSD technology
on StorageSearch.com |
Editor:- September 22, 2014 - This is a time of
year when many marketers are reviewing their business plans and wondering about
ways to increase their visibility to the people that matter in the SSD market.
You may not have known this but StorageSearch.com was the first
publication in the world to focus on the SSD market and we've been selling ads
which have helped to shape and change the SSD market for 15 years.
Here's
an interesting aspect of our customers which only occurred to me this afternoon
when I was thinking about how many great SSD ad slots we've now got to
offer.
If I look back at SSD related companies which have been
acquired since
January 2013 - who were also significant multi-year SSD advertisers on
StorageSearch.com it yields a list like this:-
Now
you may wonder - after seeing the above list - whether the primary reason
for SSD companies to advertise their wares at all was because they wanted
to get acquired?
But many of these customers of ours were advertising
SSDs on StorageSearch.com for
many years
before there was any appetite for such activities.
Why did they do
it?
They advertised to get noticed and to get more visibility for
their messages where the serious SSD customers are.
And maybe also in
some cases because they liked the market expanding SSD awareness content
which StorageSearch.com delivered.
What about advertising SSDs today?
There's
no guarantee that advertising your SSDs will lead to your SSD company getting
acquired. (That would be a ridiculous notion.)
But it will get you
noticed sooner and deliver more visibly to people who make this market happen.
So
if you're not scared of mice, and if you're involved in sales,
marketing or business development in an SSD company - then you may be interested
in learning more about this.
To learn more - contact me by email
Zsolt@StorageSearch.com
or take a look at these information pages.
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| AnandTech article re age
symmetry performance bug in Samsung's 840 EVO SSD |
Editor:- September 20, 2014 - Recalls, bugs and
firmware upgrades in consumer
SSDs are nothing new
- but there's a particularly interesting dimension of anxiety for SSD design
verifiers which is revealed in a recent story -
about
the nature of a read performance bug in Samsung's 840 EVO - which
appears in AnandTech.
The
article's author Kristian
Vättö, SSD Editor at AnandTech says - "there is a bug in
the 840 EVO that causes the read performance of old blocks of data to drop
dramatically... The odd part is that the bug only seems to affect LBAs that have
old data (>1 month) associated with them because freshly written data will
read at full speed, which also explains why the issue was not discovered until
now."
Editor's comments:- This shows that there is still
a high degree of immaturity and unwillingness to learn good practises from
other industries in some parts of the consumer design verification market.
In
many industries in which I worked in my pre online life - 1,000 hour tests
designed to seek out errors were part of the standard norm.
I first
learned about these 1,000 hour tests 35 years ago when I visited an early
production version of a fuel consumption meter and data logger which I had
designed for auto engine test beds. I was going to change the power supply for a
replacement which we had screened through extended high temperature burn in -
because we had discovered a design fault in these units which came from a
leading PSU vendor - which could be detected by such testing. Our rack wasn't
in use - so I turned the power off.
Klaxons and sonalerts started
going off all over the place! - and people started rushing up to this bed to
ask what was I was doing?! - because I had inadvertently shut down the power
to other instruments in the same cabinet which were connected to other
engines which were still undergoing 1.000 hour tests.
About 11
years later (about 1990) - and in a different company - my engineers had
designed a database driven real-time broadcast program sharing and audio
routing control system for the
BBC.
But the BBC insisted we run
a 1,000 hour software test with simulated users before they would let us
install the first system.
During the 1,000 hour test we actively ran
analysis code to look for anomalous behavior.
We found a bug! It was
in part of the real-time OS firmware which didn't recycle memory properly
after it was released from some real-time tasks.
The amounts of "stolen
memory blocks" had been too small to notice in our initial testing - but
built up over time and by adding more users. It was easy to fix - and we were
lucky that our customer had insisted on the tests.
I heard via
linkedin recently from one of the engineers who stayed with that industry - our
customer continued using and upgrading those systems for about 20 years. But the
story would have had a different ending (and much sooner) if the bugs hadn't
been picked up before being deployed to control broadcast feeds.
In
the enterprise SSD market - there's a lot more testing done on systems before
they are sold to customers.
But in the consumer market - a thousand
hours of extra design verification (42 days) can be the equivalent of as much
as 20% of the product's market life. And there's a different relationship with
end users - which verges on the low value churnable customer view rather than
towards seeking a high value long term partnership. So you can see why
engineers in consumer SSD design groups face a lot of pressure to release
designs too soon.
This type of long developing performance bug can be
a nightmare for product designers.
Due to its importance I listed it
as
1 of the 11 design
symmetries in SSD design - "age symmetry - How does the SSD performance
change relative to the time it has been running..." | | |
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