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new storage frontier | |
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SSD endurance
SSD market
history
data
recovery in SSDs
How did we get into
such a mess - with SSD software?
90% of
enterprise SSD companies have no good reasons to survive
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hold up
capacitors in 2.5" MIL SSDs
do you really need them? |
Editor:- March 31, 2015 - I've been looking at
different aspects of power hold up schemes in mission critical non volatile
memory systems for over 30 years. But every time I revisit this vast topic
and compare fresh examples from the market - I learn something a little bit
new.
My new blog -
Zero
to three seconds - demonstrates the extreme range of hold up times
inside leading edge 2.5" military flash SSDs.
...read
the article | | |
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| "That whole
dominant storage architecture thing has totally flipped. It was already slowly
turning 180 degrees a couple years ago, but it is beginning to be much more
obvious now. SAN is on the decline..." |
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| Chin-Fah Heoh, StorageGaga - in his reminiscent blog -
the
reverse wars – DAS vs NAS vs SAN (March 13, 2014) | | |
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the industrial SSD guide |
Editor:- March 19, 2015 - I've recently
refreshed the design of the industrial SSD guide
on StorageSearch.com
Part
of this redesign was bringing to the fore - a simple list of significant
companies in the market which - in a way - goes back to the kind of site
design here in the 1990s and early 2000s.
However, being conscious of
the perils that can lead to - with some pages like
RAID at one time in the
past having been lumbered by a list running into hundreds of companies - I'm
going to keep the new industrial list manageable and relatively short
(under 100 companies).
If your company is missing from this list and
you think it should be added - contact
me.
The
industrial / embedded SSD market is a segment which saw a decline in the number
of vendors for a few years at a time when managers of those companies thought
they could see bigger opportunities in other markets like consumer and
enterprise. But recently I've been seeing a resurgence in industrial SSD
company numbers for these reasons:-
- the market opportunity for industrial SSDs has grown significantly - due
to SSDs being everywhere.
And even in places you wouldn't have
expected!
That's because new system products and applications have
been enabled by SSDs and big data and IoT which never previously would have
been viable using HDDs.
That
has attracted new industrial SSD startups - who are totally focused on the
embedded market - and have chosen this in preference to all the other segments
of SSD which might have calls on their technical and business development
talents.
- many companies which had exited the industrial market earlier - discovered
they lacked the marketing skills needed to establish themselves in other
markets. So they've come back to the industrial fold.
- the infinite product scope of applications which can use embedded SSD
(inside and outside traditional data processing) has created many
opportunities for vendors to differentiate themselves by deep technology
adaptations and customizations.
This means vendors can be the
best at
1 or 2 things - without needing to compete with all things - due to the
number of permutations of applications, form factors and interfaces. The
redesign of the industrial SSD page will have 2 phases:-
- now underway - getting the shape right:- capturing the top 50 to 100
or so relevant companies which should be in this list, and providing an
overview of related articles and sub-guides.
- the next phase - will populate the vendor list with deep links to a
product example from each company.
Any questions? -
just ask. | | |
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re your autobiography...
I'd
recommend a ghost writer. |
PR Agencies - which
aren't scared of mice | |
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SSD conversations like this |
Editor:- March 12, 2015 - I talk to founders of
SSD companies nearly every day.
Yesterday - something I said - in
one of the longest conversations I ever remember having had about enterprise
SSDs - and I've had a few - inspired the person I was talking to - to change
his plans from something quite different - and develop a new SSD systems
company instead.
I learned that change of plan from his follow up
email.
And if it does happen - then when his new company is ready -
I'll let you know.
It's not unusual.
Some of the world's best
known SSD companies were talking to me - long before anyone else knew about them
- or cared about what they were thinking. Nice to know it's still happening.
The
other nice thing is when people in SSD companies (or their customers) that
I've never spoken to before - start their conversation with - I've been reading
your articles for years - and that's what got me into SSDs.
Thanks for
everyone who has said that - or thinks something similar.
So - if
you're wondering - what comes next?
I haven't run out of ideas yet.
The
next
big article will be a shocker.
The seeds were planted in 2
separate, classification type, articles I wrote years ago.
It's just
the impact of them coming together in the market - at the right time - which
will shatter many business plans - and cause people to ask themselves - why did
we ever think like that before?
If it's any consolation... I did too.
6 weeks later...
I introduced my blog with the assertion that
- "90%
of the enterprise SSD companies which you know have no good reasons to survive."
It's about drivers, mechanisms and routes towards consolidation in the
enterprise SSD market along with some other outrageous and dangerous ideas too.
These
were the very same ideas I was discussing with the reader I mentioned above who
told me that as a result he's going to start a new SSD company. ...read
the article | | |
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"What scares me is
when companies fall into the trap of trying to architect a single application to
work across multiple different cloud providers.
I understand why
engineers are attracted to this....
Unfortunately, this effort eats
into the productivity gains that compelled the organization to the cloud in the
first place." |
| Stephen Orban,
Global Head of Enterprise Strategy at Amazon Web Services in his
blog -
3
Myths about Hybrid Architectures Using the Cloud (March 5, 2015) | | |
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For
more pages like this see
storage history
month by month |
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NetApp
has stopped suing Nimble
Editor:- March 31, 2015 - Nimble Storage
recently
announced
it recently entered into a written settlement agreement with NetApp re alledged
misuse of trade secrets etc dating back to
2012-2013.
The terms of the settlement are confidential and are not material to Nimble's
financial statements.
Editor's comments:- 2 weeks later I saw
this related article -
How doomed is
NetApp? by Robin Harris
who says, among other things, "The latest troubling sign from NetApp is the
failure of their widely touted FlashRay project to ship a competitive product.
The VP in charge, left NetApp for
Pure Storage last
month..."
Intel and Micron promise 32 layer 3D nand SSDs by 2016
Editor:-
March 26, 2015 - Micron
today
announced
it is sampling a new 32 layer 3D nand flash memory using floating gate
cells - which has been designed in collaboration with Intel - and which
provides 32GB MLC (2 bits per cell) in a single chip.
A higher
density TLC (3 bits per cell) version with 48GB capacity will sample in the
next few months.
Both devices are expected to be available in SSDs
within the next year.
Toshiba samples 48-layer 3D
nand
Editor:-
March 26, 2015 - Toshiba
today announced
it is sampling the world's first 48-layer 3D stacked 2 bit nand
flash memory in 16GB
chips aimed at the high capacity SSD market.
Mass production is
anticipated to be in the first half of 2016.
Diablo's roadmap back on track following jury verdict
Editor:-
March 25, 2015 - Diablo
today
announced
it has won a "decisive victory" in its critical court battle with
Netlist.
The
jury unanimously concluded that there was no breach of contract and that there
was no misuse of trade secrets. Further, the jury confirmed Diablo's sole
ownership and inventorship of the "917 patent."
"We
are extremely pleased with the jury's verdict today," said Riccardo
Badalone, CEO and Co-Founder of Diablo Technologies. "We look
forward to getting back to serving our customers and delivering on our exciting
Memory Channel Storage roadmap."
Editor's comments:- Diablo replaced
Fusion-io as the #1
most searched SSD company by the readers StorageSearch.com in
Q3 and
Q4 2014 - because
you all know a disruptive SSD technology platform when you see it.
The
long running legal tangles got to the point where Diablo was prevented by an
injunction from making more products - pending a trial outcome. This verdict
means the enterprise application acceleration industry can resume its onwards
progress by being able to count on the availability of a significantly
different
flash latency asset
and software platform for deployments inside the server box.
SSD Guru and Vector 180 from OCZ (and some random thoughts
about product naming conventions)
Editor:- March 25, 2015 - We live
in a world where it's pointless buying a phone unless you are prepared to
develop and hone your SysAdmin skills - so I shouldn't be surprised by the
growing number of software utilities aimed at the consumer SSD market.
An
aptly named such product -
SSD Guru (not be confused with
SSD market gurus)
- appeared in an email today from OCZ - which plays a
supporting
role for the company's "next generation"
Vector 180 SSD (a
performance optimized SATA
SSD) aimed at "gamers, enthusiasts and workstation users."
Editor's
comments:- re that "next generation" tag line - as I'm not
familiar with the numbering system OCZ uses for its SSDs - I'm not sure whether
this is OCZ's 180th consumer SSD (that seems a bit low by my count) or
whether this is OCZ's 18th consumer SSD generation (that seems too high).
If I get a helpful note of what the "180" means - I'll add
a note here later.
the problem with numbers
Because I
read about so many products and suppliers - I do sometimes miss obvious
clues.
For example - it took me about 11 years to recognize that the
numbers in TMS's
rackmount SSD systems (the
RamSan boxes)
had been incrementing by 100 every year or so - each time they included a
new generation of controllers or memory. Which did make sense when it was
explained to me.
And it looks like
IBM is
still
maintaining that tradition. What comes next? (after 900?) - numbers are the
easiest part of the SSD guessing game. It's
what could be
inside the next box we're
not so hot at
guessing.
Such
product naming
schemes do run into problems after enough time has elapsed as we've seen
many times in computer history.
CPUs give us some clues - as they
were the primary apps acceleration technology before SSDs.
(80)86,
went (with some detours) to 286, 386, and 486 and then morphed into
Pentium
- which (unlike numbers) could be a registered trademark.
SPARC
started with
numbers and then added words.
SSD product names have many
naming variations
too.
But - going back to numbers.
The problem with
numbers is when they get too long (due to the longevity of the product family)
you have to recycle them - which makes it confusing for old people who saw them
the first time around.
And (I know it may be unfair to say this about
product marketers) but sometimes you get the vague feeling - particularly in
more slowly evolving markets like autos - that the names and the numbers and
the colors have changed. But inside everything that matters still remains
exactly the same as it was before.
PS - in another announcement
today - OCZ said it now has a higher capacity version of its fast enough
enterprise 2.5" SATA SSD family. The new
Intrepid
3700 SSD - has 2TB capacity, R/W speeds upto 540MB/s and 470MB/s
(128KB blocks) and 91K / 13K random
R/W IOPS
(4KB blocks) .
SolidFire opens sales channel in Japan
Editor:- March
19, 2015 - SolidFire
today
announced
it has expanded its sales reach into Japan with the opening of a new office
in Tokyo and a distribution agreement with
ITOCHU Techno-Solutions.
Samsung's new 128GB BGA TLC SSD
Editor:- March 19,
2015 - Samsung
today expanded its
eMMC
product line with a new 128GB BGA TLC SSD aimed at mid-market
smartphones and mass market tablets.
The
new 3 bit device has 260MB/s sequential read performance (similar to MLC
eMMC 5.1).
IOPS (5,000 / 6,000) are sufficient to support
high definition video.
Microsemi has a new BGA SSD
and is acquiring Vitesse for
$389 million
Editor:- March 17, 2015 - Microsemi today
introduced
its 2nd generation highly secure, rugged 64GB BGA SLC SSD - the
MSM064.
Features include:-
- TRRUST-Purge clears encryption key in less than 30ms
- hardware-based self destruct - renders media data forensically
unrecoverable in less than 10 seconds
- anti malicious attack technology
- no super caps or batteries
- write protect option for read-only applications
"Embedded
computing applications have increased the need for compact small form factor,
highly secure and trusted data-at-rest protection," said B J Heggli, GM
for Microsemi's memory and storage business. "We introduced this latest
64GB SSD in our BGA package to expressly meet the data security and extreme
reliability requirements of a growing number of embedded applications. And
because Microsemi owns the processor technology, customers are also assured of
critical long-term availability."
PS - also this week - Microsemi
announced
it has agreed to acquire Vitesse Semiconductor
for approximately $389 million.
Vitesse designs a diverse portfolio
of high-performance semiconductors, application software, and integrated turnkey
systems solutions for carrier, enterprise and
Internet of
Things (IoT) networks worldwide.
Memblaze enters 2.5" PCIe SSD market
Editor:-
March 16, 2015 - Memblaze
today announced
it is showing a 2.5"
NVMe PCIe SSD variant of its PBlaze series at
CeBIT in Germany.
Memblaze was the
27th most highly searched SSD company by readers of StorageSearch.com in
Q4 2014.
another design win for Seagate's Nytro in China cloud market
Editor:-
March 12, 2015 - QingCloud mentioned
high capacity and low cost among the reasons for selecting Seagate's
XP6209
(pdf) (PCIe SSD)
as components to build the low latency SSD infrastructure of its cloud
services for the China market - in a
press
release today.
Editor's comments:- who are the new cloud
companies in China?
Meet
China's Cloud Innovators - a blog by Charlie Dai, Principal
Analyst - Forrester
Research
See also:-
the big market impact
of SSD dark matter
SanDisk shows the softer under belly of flash
Editor:-
March 12, 2015 - SanDisk
already attracts more interest in its software from StorageSearch.com readers than any
ISV in the SSD software space - something I recently disclosed in the
Q4 2014 edition of
the Top SSD Companies.
Why so much interest?
It's because they've got a
lot of enterprise software.
(Partly due to having
acquired a lot
of software rich companies.)
In a recent press release about
SanDisk's latest contribution to open source - to benefit
Ceph storage - I saw an
interesting list of other areas they have done work on too.
- The Android OS stack for mobile devices
- The Linux kernel for memory management and file system to enable better
performance with flash
- The Android Real Path Storage library, an Apache licensed project
maintained by SanDisk, that enables application developers to use external
memory like SD cards in their Androids
- SCST, a GPL-licensed SCSI target software stack that is maintained by
SanDisk developers
- and Enterprise applications like Cassandra, MySQL, Hadoop and others to
optimize them for use with SanDisk flash technology.
It sure takes a lot of software to make
flash memory work with
the non flash world. It's much more than the low level
care stuff you'd
expect in flash
controllers.
Part of this complexity stems from the
asymmetry
inherent in flash
R/W IOPS - and the problems of masking this fact - using disguises and
ruses - from legacy software which was originally created for symmetrical
devices like
HDDs and
DRAM. But another complex
motivator in the software plot is to do with data granularity and
reliability too.
Before you get too
nostalgic
about good old DRAM, however, its reputation has been
trashed (pdf)
too.
It seems that when you scrutinize any
chips which have very small
internal geometries - then you see that bad things happen. It's just that we've
learned to expect it with flash (due to all those battles between
nice and naughty
enterprise flash) and we always expected better behavior from DRAM. So
when such problems hit good old reliable DRAM (as they
do
about once every 10 years) everyone is surprised.
 HGST
samples 3TB 2.5" PCIe SSD
Editor:- March 11, 2015 - HGST is sampling a new
range of SSDs for the 2.5"
PCIe SSD market.
The
2.5"
NVMe Ultrastar SN100 (pdf) has upto 3.2TB capacity.
Editor's
comments:- No DWPD
data was available when I looked. Which makes the recent related
announcement
somewhat useless to any product specifier. It must be aimed at investors.
Lattice closes acquisition of Silicon Image
Editor:-
March 10 , 2015 - Lattice
Semiconductor today
announced
the close of its acquisition of Silicon Image for
approximately $606 million.
3D InCites blog re Samsung's 3D TLC
Editor:- March 4,
2015 - What happens when you combine
3D
and
3
bits per cell in the same flash?
A
recent blog -
Samsung's
V-NAND Flash at the 2015 ISSCC - published on 3D InCites summarizes the key
parameters of Samsung's
approach to combining 3D and TLC and offers some critical analysis.
Commenting
on the directions for future advances - the blog's author Andrew Walker
says "I also heard that they may be looking at 4 bits/cell."
See
also:-
Samsung's
V-NAND page, Unveiling
XLC Flash SSD Technology (March 2008 )
8TB 2.5" PCIe SSDs sampling soon from Novachips
Editor:-
March 4, 2015 - Are you interested in a world's first
2.5"
8TB (15mm height) PCIe Gen2 x4 SSD (pdf) with a single controller developed
by Novachips.
in Korea?
 That
was an email I got recently from Sean Oh who is
the sales representative for these products in Europe.
What would you
say? I did the same. After reading up the info he attached (there's a
SATA version
too) I asked some questions about availability. Here's what Sean said.
- The working engineering samples have been available since last year.
- The 1st customer sample comes out in the next 30 days.
- We plan to start a mass production in 2nd half of this year.
Editor's comments:- part of this story has its roots in a news
story from May 2007
- when a company called MOSAID was talking about a new, light capacitive load,
ring based, flash memory topology called HLNAND. To make it work they needed a
controller. Novachips collaborated on the design and recently acquired the
assets and patents.
SanDisk enters the rackmount SSD market
Editor:-
March 4, 2015 - As I've been saying for the past several years now - the rack
is a strategic
component form factor for enterprise flash.
And
SanDisk
recently
announced
it has joined the enterprise
rackmount SSD market
- with a new product - 3U 512TB array of 8TB
SAS SSDs - with
iSCSI (and upto 8 way
SAS connections for
local servers) called the
InfiniFlash
system (pdf) which leverages the market proven SanDisk
ION
Accelerator software stack which came with the acquisition of
Fusion-io.
Pricing is under $2K
/ TB before
compression
or
dedupe
are applied.
Editor's comments:- SanDisk's pricing and
storage density for the InfiniFlash is similar to
Skyera's
skyHawk
FS (pdf) - launched in
October 2014 -
although the 2 products have very different internal architectures. The
InfiniFlash is an array of standard SAS SSDs while the skyHawk FS is a
proprietary design with internal
big controller
architecture - which can use any type of cheap, high density flash.
The
availability of cheap, raw, white box rackmount SSDs like this from
SanDisk,
HGST and other vendors
may put some pressure on traditional storage vendors to justify why they
charge so much for - what in most cases - are in reality vanilla flash
arrays with some added software features. But it's that software and related
integration and
migration
services which have locked newer vendors out of these older markets.
Having
said that - there are many types of users in the rackmount market who don't
want the kind of software offered by companies like
EMC,
IBM, or
HP and for whom - even the
more creatively
priced management functions integrated in boxes from newer companies like
Tegile represent an
expensive solution bundled with a data management approach which is different
to what they need.
I first wrote about the conundrum of different
rackmount SSDs - with different characteristics - co-existing at the same time
and satisfying different user risk and value judgement profiles in a
2009 article.
In the 6 years since then - as the market has grown larger - it has
been possible to delineate more functional differences in SSD box types than
existed at that time - while at the same time - the variety of possible
attached permutations - with respect to application compatibility, inherent
technology risk factors, and buyer behavior - has grown too.
The
result has been
inefficient
markets - and an inadequate range of products - often inappropriately
marketed. Problems which I identified (with help from leading users and
marketers) in my recent article -
Decloaking
hidden segments in the enterprise for rackmount SSDs
PS - prior
to being aware of the InfiniFlash I had been discussing the role of such
hypothetical white box rackmount SSDs as a factor in future
consolidation
of the market.
Micron breaks ground on $4B expansion to Singapore nand fab
Editor:-
March 3, 2015 - Micron
today celebrated
a ground breaking ceremony at the site of its Singapore NAND flash memory
fabrication facility - which is planned to get $4 billion worth of expansion
investment - and is expected to be operational in 2017.
new edition of the Top SSD Companies
Editor:- March
2, 2015 - Although it's nearly 8 years since StorageSearch.com began publishing
its landmark series the Top SSD Companies
and we now have more types of
market data about SSD
related trends than ever before - the need for a proven, focused,
crowd-intelligence based list based on search hasn't gone away.
You
could indeed argue that the need is even greater now.
We still live
in chaotic times for SSD where the disruptive influences now include more
technology types and the outcomes of the market blender includes the complex
interplay and co-existence of multiple SSD software generations.
 StorageSearch.com
recently published a new
edition of the list - based on market metrics in Q4 2014.
In the
31st quarterly edition of this article I also give you my background thinking
for why this classic series will soon be joined by a new companion set of Top
SSD Company lists - which have been 12 years in the waiting. ...read the article | |
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What happened before? - See the
SSD news archive |
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