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tallying SSD exabytes in
Q1 2015
 Editor:-
May 28, 2015 - A useful snapshot of SSD capacity and market share in Q1 2015
can be seen in a report on StorageNewsletter
based on original market data from TrendFocus.
Editor's
comments:- If you're expecting to see bigger shipment numbers for some
product types or different company names mentioned in the charts then bear in
mind that all market
research data is liable to
sampling
errors and biases of interpretation.
See also:- nand flash memory and other
SSDward leaning nvms too
Avago agrees to acquire Broadcom
Editor:- May 28,
2015 - Avago
today announced
it will acquire Broadcom
for approximatel $37 billion.
Editor's comments:- both
companies are peripheral to
the SSD ecosystem (no pun intended) insofar as they supply communications and
interface chips which connect SSDs and SSD boxes rather than having anything too
much to do with memory related controllers.
I imagine the regulators
will want to scrutinize this merger carefully as it will impact competition in
many segments of the interface chip market.
Tegile gets another $70 million funding
Editor:-
May 27, 2015 - Tegile
today
announced
it has closed a $70 million Series D funding round bringing the company's
total capital raised to $117 million.
3 new investors, Capricorn
Investment Group, Cross Creek Advisors and Pine River Capital Management, join
existing investors August Capital, Meritech Capital Partners,
Western Digital and
SanDisk to fund the
round.
Since shipping its first hybrid storage array in
2012
Tegile says it has deployed more than 1,500 systems.
update on the readiness of non flash NVMs to participate in SSDs
Editor:-
May 27, 2015 - In various interview clips in a recent article -
3D
NAND, MRAM, RRAM: Emerging opportunities and challenges in
Solid State Technology - the author Paula Doe
reports how some of the contenders to
flash memory see their
roles within the SSD ecosystem. For example:-
- "Demand for ST-RAM is coming from buffer storage applications, such
as high-end enterprise-class SSDs..."
- ReRAM has already been promised for delivery in
military SSDs (Jan 2015 news) but
forthcoming advances in repairable vertical architecture could increase the
density to the point where it's attractive as an intermediate level of memory in
servers too...
Some of these applications have been intuitively
obvious for some while - but this article gives a better idea of commercial
readiness and an indication of whether the next generation problems are being
tackled in a fast enough timeframe to be relevant to the
SSD market. ...read
the article
SanDisk hit by lawsuit re tardiness of adverse business
disclosures
Editor:- May 27, 2015 - Unwelcome news for SanDisk today from an
announcement that a
class action lawsuit has been commenced on behalf of an institutional investor
re ("SanDisk") (NASDAQ: SNDK) publicly traded securities during the
period between April 16, 2014 and April 15, 2015 (the "Class Period").
The
law firm leading this Robbins
Geller Rudman & Dowd LLP alleges, among other things, that during
the above 1 year period SanDisk did not openly disclose it was experiencing
production qualification delays "on certain key products... and may also
have concealed problems associated with its acquisition of
Fusion-io (factors
which could be assumed to affect the market price of shares) yet that during
the above period the plaintiff asserts that directors were able to sell over
$35.8 million worth of their SanDisk stock."
Editor's
comments:- A lot can happen to any SSD company during a year - especially
one - like SanDisk - which was working its way through repurposing some
inherently business transformational acquisitions at the time mentioned above.
One of the key characteristics of the SSD market in recent years (see
examples here - what changed in
2014,
2013,
2012 etc) has
been that assumptions which seemed reasonably cautious at one point in time -
can soon lose their validity or significance - due to the unpredictable market
interventions by imaginative (or lucky) competitors.
It seems to me
that unless publicly traded SSD companies issue daily updates on the internal
setbacks they encounter (which would educate their competitors and therefore be
prejudicial to their own shareholder interests) then directors of such companies
can't safely sell any of their shares until after the whole market has settled
down into a more predictable pattern - which by my guess - can't be till after
2020.
Hard to see how any company could operate under such
constraints. Which means that lawsuits are an inevitable consequence of doing
business.
fast growing Nimble comments on perceptions of being a hybrid
storage supplier in all flash applications
Editor:- May 26 , 2015 -Nimble Storage today
reported
that revenue in its recent quarter grew 53% yoy to $71 million.
In
a related
conference
call (transcript) - Suresh
Vasudevan, CEO said, among other things - "the
hybrid market we are
competing in is roughly $10 billion, growing to about $14 billion as per
IDC's estimates over the
next 3 - 4 years... the frequency with which we compete against all-flash
alternatives has increased and our win rates are indeed high... However, when we
do lose against all-flash alternatives, it's typically 2 things happening
simultaneously.
"One, the customer has a singular application
where they've taken performance challenges and the customers saying I want to
solve the needs of this particular database or this particular application. And
the customer has by and large selected all-flash arrays as the answer for that
point need and that's often where we find that we are taking perception
challenges as much as to the reality of what our platform really does."
Editor's
comments:- Another factor for hybrid companies like Nimble, Tegile etc -
when viewed from the context of some high end all flash applications - is
that much of the functionality of their tiering software is considered to be
irrelevant or simply adding to the cost and latency. This is a
segmentational
and positioning problem which isn't entirely answered by adding AFA models to
the product line.
The long term strategic question for all storage
box vendors - when seen from the perspective of
user
consolidation thinking - is to choose how they will position themselves:-
either as a strategic supplier of raw white box hardware or as an integrator or
software supplier which collaborates with someone else's standard boxes .
See also:-
Branding Strategies
in the SSD Market
IP-Maker's NVMe IP added to UNH-IOL's compatibility list
Editor:-
May 22, 2015 - IP-Maker
- which is represented in the US by Fides
Sales - today announced that its
NVMe
data transfer manager design has passed the
UNH-IOL compatibility tests and is now
listed on their NVMe
compatibility integrator's list.
IP-Maker's IP supports
performance in the range of 350K IOPS and 10µs latency in a Gen2 x4
configuration.
"We are pleased to announce this important
milestone", said Mickael
Guyard, co-founder of IP-Maker. "We are now able to provide a
compliant and high performance NVMe solution, helping storage companies to
develop PCIe SSD in a
reduced design time."
Memblaze is #1 enterprise PCIe SSD supplier in China market
Editor:-
May 22, 2015 - Memblaze
accounted for 60% market share of the
enterprise PCIe SSD
market segment in China in 2014 - according to CEO Yin Xuebing
who made this comment in a recent
press
release announcing the availability of Memblaze's new PBlaze4 700 Series
bootable 2.5"
NVMe PCIe SSDs which was demonstrated at CeBIT
in March 2015.
OCZ's programmable power envelope 2.5" hot swap NVMe
SSDs
 Editor:-
May 20, 2015 - OCZ
today revealed more details about the new models shipping in its NVMe
compatible PCIe SSD family - which was first announced last
September. We
had already heard before these new models include 2.5" hot swappable
versions.
Today OCZ said this model - the
Z-Drive 6300 SFF
will be available with usable capacities of 800GB, 1.6TB and 3.2TB (in
this quarter) followed by 6.4TB (later this year).
R/W
performance is upto 2.9GB/s and 1.4GB/s respectively. Random R/W
IOPS are
700K IOPS and 120K IOPS. Latencies are 30µs (write) and 80µs (read).
Endurance
options are 1 or 3 DWPD.
high
availability and reliability features
The new Z-Drive 6000 models
are dual ported so that 2 host systems can concurrently access the same SSD.
Additionally, the Z-Drive 6000 Series supports hot swapping of 2.5"
drives, pre-set power thresholds and temperature throttling to support many
types of enterprise ecosystems.
Editor's comments:- for various reasons to do with a
combination of standardization
efforts and changes
of ownership for nearly every major enterprise PCIe SSD company in the
market - you've had to wait 3 years since the idea of this kind of product was
first discussed seriously on
these pages and at
conferences.
What has become clear to systems architects is that these
new products offer far more flexibility in their roles than merely performance
upgrades to high end SAS
SSDs and traditional storage arrays.
Among other things these new
types of products will enable lower cost mini SSD server clustering at
PCIe latencies which will spur growth in the SDS market. At the high end - they
could become the new building blocks inside the world's most powerful computer
arrays.
Power consumption and heat in these NVMe SSDs?
I
know from talking to systems architects that the electrical power and thermal
footprints of 2.5" NVMe SSDs is a critical detail when considering the
design of dense storage arrays so I asked Scott Harlin,
OCZ for more information these factors. Here's what Scott said.
Hi
Zsolt – you are correct – the 2.5" drives can get a little toasty
packing in the higher densities into this form factor -- typical power
consumption of the Z-Drive 6000 series is 25W active and 9W idle. So we
included a few items to address these concerns:
1. - Temperature sensing and thermal throttling to maintain
consistent operating conditions even under adverse temperature variances
2. - User-selectable power envelopes, in 15W, 20W and 25W
settings, reduces wasted power when maximum performance is not required while
efficiently addressing temperature requirements in support of a variety of
ecosystems
3. - An innovative 'flow-through' case design enables more
airflow to critical components, keeping the device cool while reducing airflow
requirements
Editor's comments:- that user selectable power envelope- in graduated
steps - seems like a really useful design attribute. So I'll be watching out
for it in future arrayable SSD launches.
Coho adds all flash SSD nodes to its hybrid product mix
Editor:-
May 20, 2015 - Coho Data
today
announced
it has closed $30 million in Series C funding, bringing its total funding to
nearly $67 million.
The round was led by March Capital Partners, with
additional participation from HP Ventures and Intel Capital as well as existing
investors Andreessen Horowitz and Ignition Partners.
Coho Data also
announced the general availability of its first all-flash storage node, the
DataStream
2000f a 2U server based system which uses
Intel's
P3600
2.5" NVMe SSDs
and conventional SATA
SSDs.
Coho says that using a judicious mix of its variously
populated SSDservers
(which includes micro-tiered
hybrid systems as
well as the new pure SSD nodes) "empowers customers to efficiently support
any application at any scale, all from a "single pane of glass"
management interface, and all at less than $0.10/GB usable per month."
Caringo gets patent for adaptive power conservation in SDS pools
Editor:-
May 19, 2015 -
Caringo today
announced
it has obtained a US patent for adaptive power conservation in storage
clusters. The patented technology underpins its Darkive storage management
service which (since its
introduction
in 2010) actively manages the electrical power load of its server based
storage pools according to anticipated needs.
"The access patterns
and retention requirements for enterprise data have changed considerably over
the last few years to a store-everything, always accessible approach and storage
must adapt," said Adrian
J Herrera, Caringo VP of Marketing. "We developed Darkive to help
organizations of any size extract every bit and watt of value while keeping
their data searchable, accessible, and protected."
See also:-
petabyte SSDs,
the big market impact
of SSD dark matter
Toshiba demonstrates 3.5" ethernet hybrid
Editor:-
May 18, 2015 - Toshiba
today
announced
demonstrations of a new hybrid drive which combines HDD and flash in a
3.5" form factor
with an Ethernet interface.
Editor's
comments:- for reasons which were obvious to systems architects 10 years
ago - and haven't changed today - you will always get better control of
performance and cost by designing a
hybrid storage array
with distinctly separate HDDs
and SSDs compared to combining both these functions in a single type of drive.
But
the dream of combining these functions in a single drive to add value to hard
drives does re-emerge in different guises from time to time.
The
only merit I can see to such a product - as the new hybrid from Toshiba - is
that if you have very simplistic and primitively designed systems
software, combined
with using large arrays in a single type of applicaton - then combining both the
flash and magnetic storage in a single drive could simplify the
high availability
aspects of the design by spreading the risk and consequences of drive failures
in a homogenistic way which makes writing the software easier.
In the
consumer market -
where we've seen most of the past market experiments with
hybrid drives
- it doesn't matter if the product is withdrawn from the market after a year or
so - because the design costs only have to make sense for a brief window of
market opportunity.
But in the enterprise market - the risks of
committing an array design to a drive type which is single sourced and hasn't
got an independently arguable credible future roadmap means that such system
implementations are rare.
53% of SDS users say that flash is less than 10% of their
storage
Editor:- May 12, 2015 - What percentage of the capacity in
virtualized SDS environments is already flash?
An interesting picture
is given in a recently published survey
the
State of SDS (pdf) by DataCore - which
includes results from 477 IT professionals who are currently using or
evaluating SDS technology. Among the findings:- |
 |
- Less than 9% said that flash already acccounts for 40% or
more of their storage. And nearly half of all participants said that flash is
less than 10% of their storage capacity.
- Over 70% have flash in their budget in 2015.
- 16% of those who had used flash felt they hadn't got the apps
acceleration they expected.
- 19% said that storage failures had caused unforeseen outages.
Editor's
comments:- You can interpret these results
in
different ways. I see it as showing that there's still a many times bigger
future market for enterprise flash compared to what has already been
installed.
which market uses the highest capacity PCIe SSDs?
Editor:-
May 12, 2015 - Unlike the enterprise market where nearly everyone uses
technologies which are recognizably similar to everyone else - we don't hear so
much about advances in embedded
industrial markets
- because a technique which pushes the state of the art for one industrial
customer may be of no interest to nearly everyone else.
Now I'm
hearing more stories in which increasing SSD capacity in confined rugged
spaces is the difference.
Yesterday it was a
customer story from Waitan about designing
and supplying high capacity PCIe SSD modules for use on a drilling platform.
That was an application where paying more for the SSD to fit the space was
cheaper than making more space for the SSD.
This morning I learned
that TCS
(which is in the rugged industrial, space and defense markets) is working with
Novachips to
introduce high capacity HyperLink SSDs into their
rugged
SSD range.
If you've got something similar - particularly in the
mobile datacenter context - send me an email with the details.
Diablo's MCS supported by more slots in new Lenovo servers
Editor:-
May 6, 2015 - Diablo
Technologies today
announced
that Lenovo's new 8U
x3950
X6 servers now support upto 32 eXFlash DIMMs (memory channel SSDs)
per system.
new power fail safe file system for tiny memory IoT
Editor:-
May 5, 2015 - Datalight
today
released
a preview version of
Reliance
Edge, a power
fail-safe file system for FreeRTOS
which allows developers building IoT devices to reliably store and quickly
access data in embedded
SSDs. It requires as little as 4KB of RAM and 11KB of code size.
"Designing
a file system which met the high reliability standard set by our (high
performance)
Reliance
Nitro and could fit into tiny microcontroller based systems presented a
challenge – and I love a challenge," said Jeremy Sherrill,
architect of file systems for Datalight. "Reliance Edge offers a rich set
of features in a highly efficient architecture."
Reliance Edge can
work with a broad array of storage media—including NOR and NAND flash,
eMMC, SD/MMC, NVRAM,
USB storage, and
SATA (or
PATA) SSDs. Datalight
plans to release new pre-ported kits for other small-kernel OSes over the
coming months.
How much 3D flash in 2015?
Editor:- May 5, 2015 -
TrendForce
estimates
that 3D will make up just 7% of NAND flash's average annual output for
2015.
See also:-
flash memory,
market research
ATP Electronics to demonstrate power cycling resilience of its
industrial SSDs
Editor:- May 5, 2015 - ATP Electronics today
introduced a
range of rugged storage products specifically targeting the IoT markets. The
range include microSD/SD, CF/CFast, 2.5" SSD and other embedded flash
modules.
ATP also said it will show its "Power Cycling Test
Demonstration Kit" - which validates the company's industrially
renowned ATP
PowerProtector under any sudden/unstable power-down situations - at the
ESEC 2015 trade show Tokyo later this month.
See also:-
Power loss
protection in SSDs
who's who in ReRAM? - IHS article
Editor:- May 1,
2015 -Who's doing what re the commercialization of
ReRAM
- one of the seldomly heard from
NVM cousins - can be
learned in a new article -
Taking
Embedded ReRAM to 28nm - written by Peter Clarke
which appeared in IHSElectronics360.
Among
other things re ReRAM - Peter Clarke says - "It has been the subject of
much research over the last decade because it had been predicted that NAND
flash memory would fail to scale beyond critical dimensions of 20nm."
The
article tells you which companies are still in this technology and discusses
current memory densities and controllers. ...read
the article
See also:-
12 years of "MRAM
will soon replace flash" | |
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What happened before? - See the
SSD news archive |
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First you learned about SLC
(good flash).
Then you learned about MLC (naughty flash when it played in the
enterprise - but good enough for the short attention span of consumers).
Then naughty MLC SSDs learned how to be good. (When strictly managed.) |
| sugaring flash for
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