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storage market research
are we ready for
infinitely faster RAM?
what were the 4
big SSD ideas in 2015?
month by month SSD
news highlights in 2015
90% of
enterprise SSD companies won't survive - here's why
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billion dollar revenue enterprise SSD companies |
Editor:- November 20, 2015 - Earlier this year I
promised you a $billion / year enterprise SSD companies list (which I haven't
done yet).
If you can't wait (and like short lists) then IHS has done this already for enterprise
SSD drives (which excludes
rackmount flash
systems).
IHS's list of enterprise SSD billionaires include 3
companies:-
You
can see the numbers in a new article
here
(on Electronics360).
Among other things it says "IHS
forecasts that the SSD market to pass $13 billion in revenues this year and will
surpass HDDs in revenue by 2019 with $20.8 billion versus $19.6 billion."
As you may recall I said something similar (the SSD market will be
bigger in revenue than the HDD market ever was) in my 2012 article -
How will the hard
drive market fare... in a solid state storage world? | | |
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| "What should
applications developers do about all the possible permutations (interface and
memory technology) emerging in the market for persistent storage class memory?" |
That question is posed by Nisha Talagala,
VP Engineering - Parallel
Machines who goes on to discuss the technical design challenges and
suggests strategies in a recent
slideshare
presentation.
In order to be widely adopted, any general
abstraction solution has to embrace the business ambition of delivering
competitively useful performance.
Nisha tackles that concern head on
noting that...
"Persistent memory can be mapped in multiple ways
depending on the hardware. We need to ensure that each memory type is default
mapped to the optimal model possible for its physical attach."
Nisha's
paper compares and notes the performance boundary choke points of several
popular interface and memory (hybrid DIMM,
PCIe SSD,
Infiniband clustered
server RAM) and suggests that transparent tiering between PM and flash is a
viable software architecture approach which can deliver near optimal
performance for local and remote PM. ...read
the article | | |
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| "If you are in IT and
you work for a FORTUNE X, then you probably have an IT shop run by legacy
vendors. Yes legacy as in IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, Cisco, EMC, HP, CA, and
the list goes on and on..... These vendors control the IT spend landscape which
dominates the 70% "run" and 30% "invest" IT expense. They
are the same vendors that were chosen during the dotcom bubble. " |
| Vidya
Ramachandran, CEO and Founder - SourceRoo
- in his new blog -
Before
you renew with your legacy IT vendor think again! (November 18, 2015) | | |
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| DWPD ratings have become a
useful shortcut to filter enterprise SSDs because there's an industry-wide
consensus that the number should somehow map into recognizable application zones
and price bands. |
| what's
the state of DWPD? | | |
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SSD history
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Microsemi wins bid to acquire PMC
Editor:- November 25,
2015 - Microsemi
today
announced
a definitive agreement to acquire PMC in a
transaction valued at approximately $2.5 billion which represents a 77%
premium to the closing price of PMC's stock as of Sept. 30, 2015.
"We are pleased PMC has accepted our compelling strategic offer,
which clearly benefits shareholders of both Microsemi and PMC. We can now shift
our focus to realizing the significant synergies identified during our
comprehensive analysis," said James J. Peterson,
Microsemi's chairman and CEO. "As we have previously stated, this
acquisition will provide Microsemi with a leading position in high performance
and scalable storage solutions, while also adding a complementary portfolio of
high-value communications products."
Editor's comments:- 6 weeks ago it seemed that PMC would be
acquired by a different company - Skyworks
- which had offered to buy PMC for $2 billion. But within 10 days of that news
- Microsemi announced an
unsolicited
offer which appeared at the time to be marginally higher.
The final
deal (today) valued PMC at $500 million more than the original offer from
Skyworks - which has never shipped a line of SSDs as far as I know. So in
that respect - Microsemi - is better placed to understand and leverage PMC's
strategic product lines.
IDT samples power management chip for enterprise SSDs
Editor:-
November 19, 2015 - IDT
today
announced
it is sampling a new multi-channel power management IC (PMIC) optimized for
enterprise SSDs.
The
P8300
($5.20 each, 1,000 unit price point ) is a flexible, programmable PMIC which
can shorten time to market by enabling the reuse of power management subsystems
across multiple protocols - SAS, SATA and PCIe - and form factors. Its design
delivers an effective power backup system that's been proven in the field, as
well as stability proven in earlier generation SSD products.
Netlist allies with Samsung to codevelop flash-as-RAM DIMMs
Editor:-
November 19, 2015 - Netlist
today
revealed
how it's going to enter the storage class memory SSD DIMM wars market. This by
way of a 5 year joint development and license with Samsung which also
brings to the table $23 million of funding. The companies expect to sample
products in 2016.
Editor's comments:- 2015 was a signficant
kick-start year for the server memory market.
Retiring and
retiering enterprise DRAM was one of the three big SSD ideas of the year.
See also:- what's RAM
really?
what's the role for a Radian Memory SSD?
Editor:-
November 11, 2015 - My first instinctive impressions about new SSD products are
mostly absolutely right - but sometimes they can be dead wrong.
That's why I test my riskiest SSD assertions in reader one on ones
before simply casting them onto the web.
If you're interested you can
see some of the internal processes at work in my new blog -
what's the role for a
Radian Memory SSD?
Radian Memory was one
of several interesting SSD companies which emerged from stealth this year and
their software was awarded best software of the show award at the Flash Memory Summit.
It
was obvious to me from the first briefing email before FMS - that this product
set - which includes 2.5" NVMe PCIe SSDs was a market milestone kind of
product.
But even after all the papers and pdfs and datasheets
there were still some questions which remained unclear to me concerning the
limitations in how system architects could deploy it? And what were the ideal
kinds of roles for this type of SSD? I got good answers from Radian's CEO - whom
I had previously spoken with 12 years before.
...read the
article to learn more
Themis ships rugged mobile datacenter platform
Editor:-
November 17, 2015 - Themis Computer
today announced
immediate availability of a rugged
Infiniband connected
rackmount SSD system - called
Hyper-Unity which
integrates scalable SDS architecture software from Atlantis Computing
with 4 ruggedized, 8 hot pluggable SSD drive, RES-XR5-1U rack mounted servers
(with 1.5TB to 16TB raw capacity per node) to run virtualized applications
for rugged mobile datacenter applications.
"With the Hyper-Unity
solution, Themis and Atlantis Computing are changing the way that the DoD buys
and consumes storage" said Bill Kehret, president and CEO of Themis
Computer. "The DoD requires enhanced reliability, ultra-fast,
cost-effective storage from a trusted source – on hardware built to survive
the rigors of demanding environments..."
Virtium launches new 2.5" PATA SSDs for legacy slots
Editor:-
November 17, 2015 - Virtium
today announced
a new range of 2.5" PATA SSDs for industrial applications with capacities
from 8GB to 256GB. Virtium's new
TuffDrive
PATA SSDs have been designed as drop in replacements for legacy 2.5" PATA
SSDs or HDDs.
See also:-
BOM issues and SSDs,
PATA SSDs
hybrid arrays and HA - an INFINIDAT customer perspective
Editor:-
November 17, 2015 - How
resilient are
hybrid storage arrays?
Here's a neat quote from INFINIDAT from one
of their
customers
who said - "We conducted numerous failure tests, ranging from taking out a
node to pulling multiple disks, and the
InfiniBox didn't blink an
eye."
Diablo's blog re cost of DRAM for big inmemory users
Editor:-
November 13, 2015 - The use of the word "unfortunately" made me
smile when I saw it in a new
blog
published yesterday by Riccardo
Badalone, CEO - Diablo
Technologies.
The blog is about how the cost of DRAM impacts
users who want to run large datasets in memory (using thousands of servers to
get the memory they want).
Among other things Riccardo writes this - "Intel
and Micron, for example, cited the DRAM issue when they announced a new 3D
XPoint memory substrate that they say will be significantly denser and less
expensive that current DRAM. Unfortunately, their technology won't be
ready for a number of years."
Editor's comment:- I would
say it's unfortunate for Intel and Micron - but extremely fortunate for Diablo
that it won't be ready for years.
Diablo's solution for the same
DRAM cost problem - Memory1 (see my
article
about this) - uses flash instead of exotic new nvm.
Re - "wont
be ready for a number of years" if you're wondering about how much to
trust that assessment - it's for the obvious reason that even if the new 3D
XPoint memory does exactly what is claimed - it will take years to collect the
type of reliability data needed to convince the enterprise market to adopt it
in mission critical roles.
Riccardo's blog -
DRAM's
Surprising Role in the High Cost of Data Centers is a good read - but
doesn't contain any new ideas. It just goes over the same ground (and uses the
same examples) as Diablo cited in their Memory1 product launch in
August 2015.
Micron prefers Persistent Memory to hybrid DIMMs
Editor:-
November 11, 2015 - On the subject of
SSD names which sell
products more effectively - Micron this week
seemed keen to emphasize the newer term "persistent memory"
instead of the more common (but slightly ambiguous) "NVDIMM" in
the text of its
press
release about a new 8GB DDR4 model in this category (more precisely called
flash backed DIMMs
and also other things).
"Persistent Memory" is a better
SEO honey trap and brand differentiation warmer to anticipated future
stories from Micron about its (look Ma - no flash!)
3D
XPoint (or whatever other name it may have when it eventually appears in
the catalog).
Western Digital partners with UNIS to mine datacenter
opportunities in China
Editor:- November 9, 2015 -Western Digital today
announced
an agreement with UNIS to form a
joint venture to market and sell WD's data center storage systems in China
and to develop data center storage solutions for the Chinese market in the
future.
Editor's comments:- in recent years we've seen China
becoming the dominant market for adopting innovation in many types of
large scale data systems. And because of that many
SSD
companies have strategically seeded more of their forward looking SSD
architectural thought assets in that direction (if they didn't originally come
from there in the first place).
With this agreement WD is following a
well established trend - as the speed of its market reactions have been
slugged in the past due to regulatory issues arising from the legacy of its
dominance in the hard
drive market.
dual port GbE and USB in the same M.2 SSD from InnoDisk
Editor:-
November 3, 2015 - InnoDisk
today
announced
a product first for the M.2 SSD
market in the shape of a dual port isolated GbE compatible model -
EGUL-G201 - which also has a USB
3 interface, and fits in a 22x60mm footprint. InnoDisk says the ethernet modules
have strong electrical isolation, ESD and surge protection. | |
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What happened before? - See the
SSD news archive |
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