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| leading the way to the
new storage frontier | |
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SSD history
the fastest SSDs
what's the state of DWPD?
Capacitor
hold up times in 2.5" military SSDs
latency reasons
for fading out DRAM in the virtual memory mix
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You could say - using an
analogy from thermodynamics - that storage has lower data entropy than memory -
because you can do more with raw memory than with raw storage.
The
heat pumps - which change the roles of one memory package to another are
coming from the software market. |
| where are we
heading with memory intensive systems? | | |
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| "We just made the
first tri-state DRAM chip in the world. For the same capacity DRAM chip, with
using our patented technologies, we could reduce the memory array area up to
36%, we could reduce the power consumption up to 40%, we could also increase the
chip access speed." |
Wayne Zhang,
President and CEO at Encrip - in
his recent linkedin note -
This
chip gonna rock the DRAM industry (May 3, 2016)
Explaining how the
IP can be used Wayne said "it could be a plus to any existing DRAM
process, even Samsung's 10nm." | | |
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| what goes
on inside AES encrypted SSDs? |
Editor:-
May 24, 2016 -
Securing
SSDs with AES Disk Encryption - by C.C. Wu, VP - Innodisk - is a
recent article published on Electronic
Design.
Among other things in this article Wu cautions
readers about the limitations of encrypted SSDs...
"As strong as
the 256-bit AES encryption is on encrypted SSDs, it only protects data at rest,
i.e., when the system is turned off. To protect data in flight,
data-loss-prevention (DLP) techniques, use of secure communication protocols,
and other measures must be taken." ...read
the article | | |
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"When calculating cost v performance, its clear that flash is not the
luxury technology that some people believe it to be. Rather it is actually the
most cost effective option for performance-critical applications. Quite simply
flash will save you money." |
Satoko
Omata, Senior Journalist - Data&StorageAsean
- in her recent blog (May 5, 2016) -
Dead
or alive: is there a future for legacy storage?
Related articles
here on the mouse site:-
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| DIMM wars
at battery scale |
Editor:- May 12, 2016 - A recent blog -
How
Marvell FLC Redefines Main Memory - by Hunglin Hsu, VP
- Marvell
provides authoritative examples of the replacement ratios possible in a phone
design.
A strategic lesson to guide future designers is that even
while getting a 50% power consumption reduction (due to flash as RAM) it
is also feasible to increase application performance at the same time because
the software can work with a larger memory capacity (due to the lower
cost of flash
bytes). |
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| Among other things Hunglin says - "With FLC,
better performance can be achieved by reporting to the operating system a larger
than physically implemented main memory. The operating system is thus less
likely to kill background apps, which is why the fast app switching is possible.
The FLC hardware does all the heavy lifting in the background and frees up the
tasks of the operating system." ...read
the article | | |
|
... |
|
| "If you've recently
been on the acquired side of an acquisition send me your best advice. I'd love
some words of wisdom for myself and to be able to share with my team." |
| Marilyn Becker,
Director, HR Systems at SanDisk
in her
new
blog (May 10, 2016) about waiting to be acquired by Western Digital -
...read
the article. | | |
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|
| what do
today's prototype kits tell us about IoT's future? |
Editor:- May 9, 2016 - Companies in the
industrial SSD
market have been saying in recent years that IoT is a market which could
provide a business boost for size and power constrained storage technologies.
But when new systems go to market their design origins can be almost
unrecognizable.
An interesting preview of raw technology
ingredients in the future mix is -
10
DIY Development Boards for IoT Prototyping written by Janakiram MSV, Founder
Janakiram & Associates - published
in the New Stack.
Janakiram's blog
includes prices and capabilities for a range of prototyping boards.
It
was also interesting for me to see the breadth of
Janakiram's other blogs about
changes in computing based around the convergence of cloud, big data
architecture and IoT. ...read
the article | | |
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| Get your
limericks in for the Flash Memory Summit |
Editor:- May 5, 2016 - It's not often I mention
competitions in these pages but here's a rare exception.
NVMdurance today
announced
a Flash Memory Limerick competition. The winner will be announced at the Flash Memory Summit. Rules
can be seen
here.
Editor's comments:- when I saw the
linkedin
post about this by Aisling
Foley at Aisling Foley Marketing
- I couldn't stop myself thinking...
 Aha!
- now I know more about NVMdurance's technology and the
5 stage life
cycle budget (pdf) it uses to dress the flash in a fashion which is age
appropriate - how can I get that in?
The sages of flash now agree
That if you fall out of a tree
To increase your chances
Grab hold at five branches
And swing around judiciously
Editor again - I still can't decide
whether "grab hold of" is better than "grab hold at".
One
sounds more natural while the other sounds forced but more accurately
paints the picture. But I'm not going to agonize over it any longer. And just
to be clear. I myself don't enter competitions. So your field is clear (of
mice anyway). | | |
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Top SSD Companies - 36th quarterly edition
Editor:- May 31, 2016 - Change continues in the SSD market with 3 companies
having entered the
Top SSD Companies List
for the first time based on reader search activity in
Q1 2016. They
were:-
For 9 years the Top SSD Companies has been one of the most popular articles here
on the mouse site. You may ask - is it still needed?
The answer is
yes. Despite the number of big
acquisitions in
the SSD market in recent years - we're still on the last stretches of an upward
ramp of vendors in the SSD market because of new opportunities being created by
changes which are necessary and predictable before we get to the kind of
standardized product roles and ecosystem which will lead to a
collapse
in distinct brands needed to sustain the market. ...read the article
Pure's CEO says his legacy systems competitors are 2-3 years
behind in flash/cloud centric software
Editor:- May 26, 2016 -
Pure Storage
reported that revenue for its recent quarter was approx $140 million, up 89%
from the year ago period.
In
his
blog
which recaps business highlights CEO - Scott Dietzen - comments
on the nature of the competition he sees from legacy storage companies.
He
says - "In our view, refurbished mechanical disk-era designs from the last
century cannot fulfill the needs of the modern data center: solid-state flash
memory and cloud demand a holistic rethink. Yet the majority of FlashArray's and
all of FlashBlade's competition comes from pre-cloud disk-centric retrofits..."
...read
the article
memory intensive data architecture emerges in a new family of
latency roled boxes - unstealthed by Symbolic IO
Editor:- May 25,
2016 - 1 petabyte usable storage in 2U along with a
flash backed RAM
rich server family which uses patented CPU level aware cache-centric data
reduction to deliver high compute performance are among the new offerings
unveiled
today by Symbolic IO
which has emerged from stealth mode.
Founder & CEO, Symbolic IO -
Brian Ignomirello,
said - "This industry hasn't really innovated in more than 20 years, even
the latest offerings based on flash have limitations that cannot be overcome.
Our goal at Symbolic IO was to completely redefine and rethink the way computing
architectures work. We've completely changed how binary is handled and
reinvented the way it's processed, which goes way beyond the industry's current
excitement for hyper-conversion."
Giving a clue to
performance Ignomirello said - "One of our early tests, allows us to
run a full cable class content delivery network over 80+ nodes, while streaming
80+ full-featured movies simultaneously on one channel and requires less than 8%
of the CPU capacity and we had plenty of headroom to run more. IRIS
(Intensified RAM Intelligent Server) is 10,000 times faster than today's flash."
Editor's
comments:- I hadn't spoken with Symbolic IO (when I wrote this) but my
first impression was that the company is in line with at least 3 strategic
trends that you've been reading about on StorageSearch.com in recent years:-
Their
company profile summarizes their capability like this...
"Symbolic
IO is the first computational defined storage solution solely focused on
advanced computational algorithmic compute engine, which materializes and
dematerializes data effectively becoming the fastest, most dense, portable and
secure, media and hardware agnostic storage solution."
For more
about the company's background see this article -
Symbolic
IO Rewrites Rules For Storage on Information
Week.
From the marketing point of view it's interesting to see that
in its launch press release Symbolic IO positions itself in the
DIMM Wars
context in this way "IRIS... is 10 times faster than 3D XPoint."
Symbolic
IO says the new systems will be start to become generally available in late Q4
2016.
From an
enterprise
segmentation viewpoint the IRIS systems will be proprietary. There is space
for such approaches in the future market consolidation roadmap because not
everyone needs the fastest performance. But many
webscale SSD companies
are already using data reduction techniques for their own utilizations and
acceleration purposes.
The new thing - if there is a new thing - is
that Symbolic IO will make available boxes which incorporate modern data
architectures from a single source.
Although like all new systems
companies they'll have to wade their way through the apps accreditation and
compatibility lists before their revenues create any ripples - an adoption
dampening factor I wrote about in my 2013 article
Scary Skyera.
See
also:- towards SSD
everywhere software
Toshiba launches fast M.2 SSD for notebooks
Editor:-
May 19, 2016 - May 24, 2016 -
Toshiba today
launched its fastest yet SSD for the
consumer upgrade
market in the US. The OCZ RD400
is an M.2 form factor NVMe
PCIe SSD with 0.3 DWPD
endurance and sequential R/W of 2,200 / 620MB/s (for the entry level 128GB
model).
AccelStor
adds 16G FC to 1U AFA range
Editor:- May 19, 2016 - AccelStor today
announced its has
added dual port 16Gbps FC connectivity to its
NeoSapphire 1U
rackmount SSD product line which was previously available with
InfiniBand or 10GbE
iSCSI.
enterprise PCIe SSD shipments grew 16% Q-Q
Editor:-
May 18, 2016 - TrendFocus
today announced
publication of its
Q1
2016 nand/SSD quarterly market report.
TrendFocus says the
enterprise SSD market saw growth in all segments -
SATA,
SAS, and
PCIe. |
 |
For enterprise SATA SSDs, unit growth compared to
the previous quarter was 5%, while SAS and PCIe saw higher growth at
6.7% and 16.3%, respectively.
Editor's comments:-
In Q1 2016 SSD shipments reported by TrendFocus were 30 million units.
Compare this to Q1 2014 for which period TrendFocus reported
15
million units. This shows SSD shipments over all markets have doubled in 2
years.
See also:-
storage market research
IBM
says 90nm PCM can work with 3 bits per cell
Editor:- May 17, 2016
- IBM today
announced
that its researchers have demonstrated reliable operation of 3 bits per cell PCM
in a low capacity test rig using 90nm CMOS technology.
Editor's
comments:- in the flash
memory market each doubling capacity transition in a single cell
(first from SLC to MLC, then from MLC to TLC) enabled new market adoption due to
the lower cost of packing in more data in similar physical size cells.
Knowing
that TPCM is possible will be encouraging to researchers but with the miniscule
amounts of capacity which are currently viable such future applications will
be limited to architectural niches in rare space constrained chips (such as
state machine registers for fast reboot in embedded processors) rather than
general purpose memory or storage.
Perspective:- 5 years ago in
June 2011 - NVSL demonstrated the world's first
PCIe SSD using PCM as the memory type in the array.
AMD enters M.2 SSD market
Editor:- May 16, 2016 -
AMD is now
offering a range of branded M.2
SSDs for the consumer
market. A blog on CIO.com discusses the
details
here.
Recadata shows military SSDs at CIDEX 2016
Editor:-
May 14, 2016 - Recadata
exhibited
this week at the 10th
China
International Defense Electronics Exhibition (CIDEX 2016) in
Beijing,China.
Editor's comments:- the range of options, such
as conformal coating, data destruction etc is conveniently shown on a model by
model basis in Recadata's
military SSD overview page.
One of the interesting new things I
noticed on Recadata's web site is that the company talks about its "10
years experience in the SSD market". That refers to its key people who
worked at other SSD companies before the company was founded in
2009.
In
my recent article-
a
simple list of military SSD companies I discussed some of the complex
factors like this which makes it difficult to create a simple list of "experienced"
military SSD companies.
E8 Storage gets funding for NVMe rackmounts
Editor:-
May 10, 2016 - E8 Storage today
announced
a $12 million Series B financing round led by Accel, with participation from
existing investors Magma Venture Partners and Vertex Ventures. The investment
will help the company to launch its software-defined NVMe rackmount flash
storage.
See also:-
investments in SSDs,
rackmount SSDs
SanDisk will be a WDC company Thursday
Editor:- May
10, 2016 - SanDisk
today
announced
that the Ministry of Commerce of China has approved the acquisition of
SanDisk by Western
Digital. All necessary regulatory approvals for the acquisition have
now been received and the transaction is expected to close on Thursday, May 12,
2016.
See also:-
timeline of acquired
SSD companies since 2000
Infinidat has shipped over 400PB
Editor:- May 10,
2016 -
Infinidat
today announced that in Q1 2016 shipments of its
InfiniBox
enterprise storage array increased by 300% compared to the year ago period
and now amounts to 422 petabytes worldwide. One of Infinidat's Fortune 500
customers now has over 10PBs of InfiniBox storage spread across multiple
sites.
thinking about latency?
Editor:- May 9, 2016 - "Little's
Law is key to understanding why lower latency is good" says Woody Hutsell,
Technologist, Evangelist - IBM in
series 2, episode 4
- the SSD
Bookmarks - published recently on StorageSearch.com ...read the article
Editor's
comments:- you'll need to set aside some serious reading time when you
follow up Woody's article suggestions.
 Inside
EMC's DSSD
Editor:- May 5, 2016 - An interesting glimpse inside the
box of EMC's DSSD
appears in a new article -
Up
Close And Personal on Tom's IT Pro.
In
a comment about SSD
controllers - the author Paul
Alcorn says that the Flashtec NVMe1032 (from
PMC
acquired by
Microsemi) which is
used by EMC in this array also appears in SSDs by
OCZ,
Memblaze,
Samsung and
HGST. ...read
the article
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| "The need for
reviving the SSD bookmarks
series concept after a 5 year gap is because while we're all busily dodging
tornadoes in Kansas to get to a consolidated market there's a lot of dust
making it harder than ever to see what's what."
|
| Zsolt Kerekes,
editor - StorageSearch.com | | |
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Reliability is more than
just MTBF... and unlike Quality - it's not free.
The battle for
storage reliability never stops.
It has to be fought - in every place
where physics intrudes on data integrity.
It must be fought and won
anew - in every technology generation and in every new product design. |
storage reliability
high availability
enterprise SSDs | | |
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| Why can't SSD's most ardent
believers agree on a single shared vision for the future of solid state
storage? |
| the SSD Heresies | | |
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Mays of yore in
SSD market
history |
13 years ago -
May 2003
-
Imperial
Technology launched WhatsHot SSD - a hotspot analysis and tuning
tool for fast rackmount SSD accelerators.
9 years ago - May 2007 -
MOSAID announced
its HLNAND flash technology which could sustain 800MB/s.
6
years ago - May
2010 - SandForce
announced the first branding program for SSD controllers.
3
years ago - May
2013 - Micron
began sampling a new hot swappable 2.5" PCIe SSD with 1.4TB MLC
capacity and 750K R IOPS. | | |
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