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| leading the way to the
new storage frontier | |
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top SSD companies
industrial
SSDs - boring right?
after AFAs -
what's the next box?
3D nand fab
yield - the nth layer tax?
how fast can your SSD
run backwards?
timeline
of Toshiba's forced memory sale
capacitor
hold up times in 2.5" military SSDs
where are we
heading with memory intensive systems?
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| Seagate confirms $1.25
billion stake in consortium to acquire Toshiba Memory |
Editor:- September 28, 2017 - Seagate today
confirmed
its participation in the consortium led by Bain Capital Private Equity that has
entered into an agreement to acquire Toshiba Memory Corporation.
In the agreement, Seagate has committed to provide up to $1.25 billion in
financing to support the acquisition, to be provided at closing, which is
expected by March 2018. In addition, Seagate expects to enter into a long-term
NAND supply agreement with Toshiba Memory that will provide continuity of raw
NAND for Seagate's expanding SSD product portfolio.
Editor's
comments:- Seagate's involvement in this acquisition was speculated in some
earlier reports on other sites but is now confirmed.
Although
Seagate is not the biggest supplier of finance in this deal it is the most
interesting for me because its competitor
Western Digital also
has a different kind of stake in Toshiba Memory.
The inevitable
conflicts of interest will require resolution agreements (or lawsuits) to
determine how to compartmentalize and allocate some of the memory products -
particularly those which involve SSD IP from SanDisk. | | |
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| "When Rob Commins, VP
of marketing at Tegile looks into the crystal ball, he sees one large shared
memory pool as opposed to a shared storage pool." |
Above quote from the blog -
How
Will All-Flash Storage Look in 5 Years? - EnterpriseStorageForum.com
(September 12, 2017)
Editor's comments:- The big tiered memory
appliance having more capacity than today's AFAs was the home page blog on
StorageSearch.com in April 2017 - see
cloud adapted
memory systems - "raw chip memory... how much as SSD? how much as
memory?" | | |
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What's the new business
plan for Nimbus?
Does selling SAS SSD drives replace selling petabyte
AFA systems?
How has Nimbus been affected by the memory shortages and
higher memory prices? |
| sauce for the SSD
box gander | | |
|
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| Micron sells Lexar to
Longsys |
Editor:- September 4, 2017 - Longsys (which already
sells over 100 million flash-based products / year) recently
announced
it has acquired the Lexar
trademark and branding rights from Micron.
"The
Lexar brand has long been recognized as a leading brand for high-performance,
high-reliability removable storage solutions for a wide variety of applications,
such as the professional photography market."
"We are very
honored to acquire the Lexar brand," said Huabo Cai, CEO of
Longsys.
Editor's comments:- with the recent shortages in the memory
market it's not worth Micron having any focus in the retail consumer market
compared to other higher value opportunities like the cloud and enterprise.
Longsys is better placed to make the Lexar brand work in the current
difficult market conditions because it's a specialist in this type of supply
chain.
Lexar - history
on Wikipedia
branding
strategies in the SSD market
SSD company and IP
acquisitions and reasons from 2000 to 2017
Later:- (Sep 18,
2017) - An article
on DigiTimes clarified some of the future plans for Lexar quoting statements
from Cai Huabo Chairman Longsys. Among other things Huabo indicated that
Lexar will be positioned as a high end supplier, will diversify its chip base,
include new high end executives who have been recently headhunted from leading
SSD companies and will not overlap with Longsys's oem business. | | |
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SSD news - September
2017
more pages like
this? - archived storage news before and after |
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| TrendForce says nand flash
shortages may end in 2018 |
Editor:- September 27, 2017 - After 6
consecutive quarters of shortages in the
nand flash memory market
TrendForce today
said it expects
"supply and demand will reach a balance in 2018, moving away from the
undersupply situation of 2017."
TrendForce anticipates that
seasonal effects may result in NAND temporarily swinging from undersupply
to oversupply in Q1 2018. But says the overall market trend for the whole 2018
is toward a stable equilibrium of supply and demand. The global NAND Flash bit
supply growth rate is currently projected at 42.9%, while the bit demand growth
rate is projected at 37.7%.
Editor's comments:- In 2017 the market
learned that all the past assumptions about how long the memory industry takes
to stabilize yields for new devices (and how those projections compare to
initial characterization phases) were wrong due to
nth layer tax in
high rise 3D. The memoryfication of computing (big memory as the new normal)
is also creating entirely new use cases which create additional demands on
chips in a parallel course to SSD but which are semi-independent of storage's
migration towards more solid state. So there are more memory demand factors at
work - not just more demand from previously well understood trends.
I
explained why I think it's likely that 2018 will end with shortages too in my
recent blog -
miscellaneous
consequences of the 2017 memory shortages.
See also:-
other market research
stories related to SSD
Toshiba says it will sell memory business to Bain led consortium
Editor:-
September 20, 2017 - Toshiba
today
announced
its long awaited decision about who it has chosen to sell its memory business
to. It's a consortium led by Bain Capital using an acquisition cutout filter
created for this purpose called K. K. Pangea. The transaction (worth about $18
billion) is "expected to close by the end of March 2018."
Editor's
comments:-
earlier
reports which had speculated about the identity of members of the
consortium named at various times Dell, Apple and Seagate.
Toshiba
said in the above announcement "Western Digital has sought to prevent the
sale of the interests of the joint parties (meaning Toshiba and WDC) to any 3rd
party and Toshiba and WDC are currently engaged in litigation and arbitration."
An
article
on Bloomberg about the announced sale process says "The consortium
members weren't named in Wednesday's statement to the Tokyo Stock Exchange." |
|
| Seagate
renews custom supply agreement with Baidu |
Editor:- September 18, 2017 - Seagate - which has
admitted being negatively impacted by the
memory
shortages of 2017 and which sells
SAS SSDs through its
memory partner Micron
(although "the quantity is not huge" - according to a recent
article
on SeekingAlpha.com) and anyway this legacy SAS enterprise segment is
under attack from new competitors using
Nimbus's reference
design platform - today
announced
a new strategic agreement with Baidu which
renews and expands an earlier collaboration agreement announced 3 years ago.
Among other things Seagate says - "With regard to new products,
Baidu will be at the forefront of Internet users in China implementing Seagate's
new storage products, and also the 2 sides will jointly develop customized
systems to meet Baidu business needs. In addition, the procurement model for
both companies will be further upgraded to save costs for each side."
Editor's
comments:- In an SSD
predictions article (Dec 2015) I said...
"The urge towards
greater customization will be driven by the need to improve the efficiency of
SSDs (cost of raw materials and competitiveness) and also technical
characteristics (performance, power consumption, reliability etc) which are
optimized specifically for well defined application specific needs."
Fast
forward to now - In the next few years (2018/19) storage users and suppliers
need to make plans for a memory ecosystem in which the traditional assumptions
about downward memory pricing and ample availability may no longer be valid.
These trends will
drive all data-factory industries to look at opportunities to increase
efficiency which - at system scales - will benefit from (and necessitate)
custom rather than standard design products.
See also:-
the business of custom
SSDs
CAEN launches high availability 2U FC AFA
Editor:-
September 15, 2017 - CAEN
Engineering today introduced the
CAEN
CEI-826-FXD - a 2U 10GbE / 16G FC AFA (with 26 native 12Gb SAS bays) for
applications such as big data, HPC, Hadoop etc.
The CEI-826-FXD's
dual-active controller architecture enables both controllers to concurrently
provide storage services in real time. Active-Active architecture doubles the
available host bandwidth and cache hit ratio, ensuring the greatest utilization
of system resources and maximum throughput. If one controller fails, the other
controller transparently takes over all storage services. In addition to storage
services, management services can transparently pass to the secondary
controller.
The CAEN array offers high availability with no single
point of failure. All critical components are hot pluggable andengineered with
full redundancy. Thanks to this robust design, this system can withstand
multiple component failures and achieves 99.999% availability. The CAEN
CEI-826-FXD solution supports RAID levels 0 ,1 ,0+1 ,3 ,5 ,6 ,10 ,30 ,50, 60,
and N-way mirror.
hyperscale is nearly 1/4 of all enterprise storage revenue
Editor:-
September 14, 2017 - A new
report
from IDC confirms
the growing size of the enterprise storage systems market related to
hyperscale datacenters. Sales by ODMs to the hyperscale segment grew 73.5%
year over year to $2.5 billion in in the 2nd quarter 2017 to reach nearly a
quarter of the entire $10.8 billion in all segments.
Editor's
comments:- 5 years ago in my article -
the big market impact
of SSD dark matter - I wrote about the future importance of web scale and
cloud companies to the development of the enterprise SSD market. These users
have been leading the curve in mainstream storage and memory architecture
adoption because they get immediate cost. benefits from
efficiency oriented
designs.
These changes in
storage
market segmentation have also encouraged new
rackmount SSD
vendors to nurture significant business ambitions with unbloated lean product
catalogs while ignoring traditional (declining) legacy markets.
Mercury's 3D BuiltSECURE memory will take to the skies
Editor:-
September 11, 2017 - Mercury Systems
today
announced
it received a $8 million order from a leading defense prime contractor for
BuiltSECURE high density secure memory devices manufactured at its DMEA-trusted
facility in Phoenix, Ariz. The high-speed memory devices will be integrated into
active electronically scanned array (AESA) radar systems deployed on an advanced
airborne military platform.
BuiltSECURE high density secure memory devices use Mercury's 3D
packaging technology to transform a 2D array of discrete memory devices into a
single, vertically stacked, dense ball grid array (BGA) package. Delivering
space savings up to 75%, the memory devices are also precision engineered to
withstand the harshest of operating conditions encountered during military
operations.
See also:- military
SSDs, what's RAM really?
Series A funding for RISC CPUs in DRAM
Editor:-
September 8, 2017 -
UPMEM - a fabless semiconductor
startup - today announced
3 million Euros series A funding for its Processing In-Memory technology.
This
integrates user-API accessible RISC processors as SoCs in DRAM. The company has
been
reported
in eeNews (Oct 2016) as saying...
"The fundamental benefit of
processing-in-memory is the combination of DRAM and CPU. We attach 1 DPU per
DRAM bank. It means 16 cores per 8Gbit DRAM chip. On a 16Gbyte DIMM, we deliver
256 cores, and 8 of them can be added to a standard CPU socket. We end up with a
co-processing system of 2048 cores together with 128Gbytes of DRAM per socket."
The PIM chip, integrating UPMEM's proprietary RISC processors (DRAM
Processing Units, DPUs) and main memory (DRAM), is the building block of the
first efficient, scalable and programmable acceleration solution for big data
applications. Associated with its Software Development Kit, the UPMEM PIM
solution can accelerate data-intensive applications in the datacenter servers 20
times, with close to zero additional energy premium.
"We are no
longer in an era were CPUs and other hardware getting continuously faster would
mask the slow speed of inefficient software," said Reza Malekzadeh, General
Partner at Partech Ventures (among the investors). "UPMEM's solution
addresses the performance needs of modern scale-out applications while
preserving datacenter and infrastructure hardware investments."
Editor's comments:- As a fan of
ratios
in assessing new technologies - on
linkedin I
said...
"A simple way to understand the kind of application
opportunities and limits of Upmem's solution is to look at the ratio of CPU
cores to GB of DRAM. That gives you the power envelope and tells you what
problems it's best suited for. The articles
linked on Upmem's web site are very informative as far as they go."
Upto
this announcement the spectrum of
in-situ
SSD processing solutions in the market had ranged in latency and benefit
terms from:-
- adding user deployable API and RAM in the flash controller (NxGn - which exited stealth
July 2014),
The memoryfication of the enterprise and the aspiration
towards doing
more within memory systems (which will lead to storage systems being an
emulation in memory and the
obsolescence
of the AFA as we know it) is being driven by
new
storage applications for big apps (as described in a slides by Parallel
Machines in February
2017 .
PS - "The first time I suggested to a processor
design team that they should look at adding support for solid state storage in
their new CPUs instead of just adding more cores was about 2000. I got the
response at that time - what's an SSD? And nothing more came of the matter."
- from the blog -
optimizing
CPUs for use with SSDs in the Post Modernist Era of SSD and Memory Systems
recent updates on Toshiba's forced memory business sale
Editor:-
September 6, 2017 - here's a noise filtered reduced summary of recent
news reports about the continuing
saga
of Toshiba's forced memory business sale.
Reuters
(September 1, 2017) quoted extracts from a letter written by WDC's CEO to
Toshiba - in August - which regrets the "significant ill will" felt
by Toshiba caused by tensions between the 2 companies which have arisen as a
result of the sales process.
Among other things WDC employees had been
locked out of Toshiba plants and databases which had shared ownership in July
according to a
report
by Silicon Valley Business Journal (July 19, 2017).
Coming up to
date (September 6, 2017)
Nikkei
reported that WDC "has asked to buy some chip production capacity at
fabrication facilities in Yokkaichi, Japan, in which it jointly invests with
Toshiba" to guarantee its share of memory chips produced at the plant.
This nice legalistic distinction of owning machinery is
described as a possible way to avoid delays in transferring funds to Toshiba
which would be inevitable due to regulator scrutiny if WDC were to purchase
the company.
A fascinating noisier picture of how WDC and Toshiba
have been dancing around these issues in recent weeks can be seen in this
new (September 5, 2017) timeline on SeekingAlpha -
WDC
and Toshiba - Why This Time is Different. | |
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| If you're one of those who
has suffered from the memory shortages it may seem unfair that despite their
miscalculations and over optimimism the very companies which caused the
shortages of memory and higher prices - the major manufacturers of nand flash
and DRAM - have been among the greatest beneficiaries. |
| consequences
of the 2017 memory shortages | | |
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"The unexpectedly
higher price of DRAM and nand flash in the past several quarters due to demand
and yield issues has been like manna from heaven to companies with alternative
nvms.
The change in relativistic competitive landscape has had the
same effect as if the alternative nvms could time travel 2 years into the future
while nand and DRAM have stayed looped in Groundhog Day." |
| Zsolt Kerekes,
editor - StorageSearch.com
commenting on -
Making money
is so DRAM easy for some memory-flingers - the Register (August 17, 2017) | | |
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| Are we
there yet? |
| After more than 20 years of writing guides to
the SSD and memory systems market I admit in a new blog on
StorageSearch.com -
Are
we there yet? - that when I come to think about it candidly the SSD
industry and my publishing output are both still very much "under
construction". ...read
the article | | |
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| after AFAs?
- the next box |
Throughout the
history of
the data storage market we've always expected the capacity of enterprise user
memory systems to be much smaller than the capacity of all the other attached
storage in the same data processing environment.
 A
new blog on StorageSearch.com
- cloud
adapted memory systems - asks (among other things) if this will always be
true.
Like many of you - I've been thinking a lot about the
evolution of memory technologies and data architectures in the past year. I
wasn't sure when would be the best time to share my thoughts about this one.
But the timing seems right now. ...read the
article | | |
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| RAM has changed from being
tied to a physical component to being a virtualized systems software idea - and
the concept of RAM even stretches to a multi-cabinet memory fabric. |
| what's
RAM really? - RAM in an SSD context | | |
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| SSD news in
Septembers of yore |
- September 2000
- M-Systems' Diskonchip SSDs appeared on Linux SBCs made by VMIC.
- September 2005
- SimpleTech launched the world's first dual interface SSD.
- September 2007
- Texas Memory Systems began shipments of the
RamSan-500 - a 4U FC or
IB flash based SSD accelerator with 2TB capacity and hot swappable flash
modules. This model from the world's oldest enterprise SSD company heralded
a pivotal market
switch from RAM to flash in performance optimized storage boxes.
- September 2011
- Kaminario announced it was using Fusion-io's PCIe SSDs as a new option in
its K2 rackmount SSD product line. Before that the K2 had been RAM only.
- September 2013
- Micron began sampling the first implementation of its Hybrid Memory Cube
- a DRAM architecture concept - which had been launched 2 years before.
| | |
| . |
.
.
.
.VCs
in SSDs
SSD
controllers
Can you
trust SSD market data?
what's
RAM really? - RAM in an SSD context
Can you tell me the best
way to get to SSD Street? |
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