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| leading the way to the
new storage frontier | |
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the SSD Heresies
Top SSD Companies - 2007 to
2018
how
fast can your SSD run backwards?
are we ready for
infinitely faster RAM?
40 years of thinking
about nvm endurance
how
not to compile a list of military SSD companies |
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data
integrity in DRAM
new paper lists and describes known techniques |
Editor:- September 19, 2018 -
A
Survey of Techniques for Improving Error-Resilience of DRAM is a new
research paper by Sparsh Mittal
- Assistant Professor at IIT Hyderabad and Maruthi S Inukonda
published in the
Journal
of Systems Architecture.
The authors say - "Aggressive
process scaling and increasing demands of performance/cost efficiency have
exacerbated the incidences and impact of errors in DRAM systems. Due to this,
improvements in DRAM reliability has received significant attention in recent
years from both academia and industry. In this paper, we present a survey of
techniques for improving reliability of DRAM-based main memory. We classify the
works based on key parameters to emphasize their similarities and differences.
This paper is expected to be useful for computer architects, chip-designers and
researchers in the area of memory/system-reliability. ...read
the article
Editor's comments:- Among other things this
paper has a detailed analysis of multi-dimensional ECC schemes, multi pin
correction codes (discussion of fault coverage and overheads), the efficacy
of retirement schemes for pins and chips,
chipkill,
RAID and various schemes
for stacked DRAM arrays.
See also:-
DRAM news in an SSD context,
reliability stories
in the news archive,
fault tolerant
SSDs | | |
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sanitizing sensitive SSDs? heed my words oh prideful SSD
from
dust you were born
and unto dust you shall return |
Editor:- September 25, 2018 - A reader - Simon Zola
- Manager, AVTEL Data
Destruction emailed me last week after seeing my recent home page blog -
looking
back at my 19 years of writing about the data recovery market - which I
concluded with this..
Is
there an opposite concept to data recovery?
Yes.
The flip side to data recovery is fast purge SSDs and
disk sanitizers.
Simon said - "I have only just come across you
and your site and I would love to hear your opinion on meaningful data
sanitisation of SSD."
I
thought to myself how many years is it since I set up a dedicated
SSD fast erase / purge
page? - I checked. It started in 2009. (This is one of the joys and
frustrations of the web. Frustration - that you can't find stuff which has
been around for a long time - because it gets drowned by social chit chat. Joy -
in knowing that there must be a lot more readers out there who also care about
the same problems.)
Anyway - what I said to Simon was - "There is
a double digit list of standards by defence and government agencies which cover
various use cases and whether the drive is desired to be redeployed for another
project or not. The purpose of extreme autonomous SSD purge is to destroy enough
critical chips in the encrypted SSD so that if it falls into the wrong hands
(captured by enemy) then the SSD data will remain immune to the best
efforts of forensic data
recovery. Thats just one reason why DR and security agencies intersect and
are mutually aware. But as DR gets better then sanitisation has to advance too
(best way being destruction of the chips)."
Anyway Simon - whose
company does Onsite Physical Destruction of HDDs and SSDs in Australia pointed
me towards an interesting
video - re Mobile Data
Destruction which shows the type of thing his company does. It's on
youtube which means that many of you won't be able to see it right now if
you're viewing this at work.
So I'll describe what happens...
The video shows a van which arrives at your site and delivers via a conveyor
belt all the drives you want shredded - presumably while one of your security
people watches it happening. (You'd have to verify the exact design and chutes
etc yourself obviously to satisfy yourself there are no magical trap doors - or
maybe you could just rent the facility. It depends on your own circumstances.)
That prompted me to realize that it had been about 2005 when I had
last written much about the
disk sanitization
services and equipment business (as opposed to autonomous drive purge)
because in a way - once you know what needs to be done - what more can you say
about it? But maybe that page could do with a refresh - which is why I'm writing
this.
We are much more sensitive and vigilant about environmental
impacts nowadays (2018) compared to the start of my own career (1977) when
many of the industries which paid the wages of our local communities and
where our friends and neighbors and customers worked were inevitably sometimes
spilling stuff into the sky, ground and water.
So I said - Hi
Simon - I forgot to ask this... how is the shredded material from the sanitized
drives processed? I mean the cost from an environmental hazard point of view?
Simon said - 0 to land fill. (And then he gave me a list of who
reprocesses what afterwards - which you can find out more about on his web
site.)
Editor's comments:- I'm guessing that wherever you live you
might be interested in the possibilities opened up a mobile service like this.
My own modest needs in this category have always been simply
managed by the expedient of a log splitter or ax - but I'm only smashing one
drive each season or less. Some of the kids of family friends have made
artworks out of the little chunks of smashed up drives and mangled chips.
Small
dustry grains are less artistic but better from the security angle. | | |
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| If you could go back in
time and take with you a factory full of modern memory chips and SSDs
(along with backwards compatible adapters) what real impact would that have?
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| are we ready for
infinitely faster RAM?
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SSD news - September
2018StorageSearch.com /
SSD history
/ more pages
like this |
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2 new reports on the SSD market
Editor:-
September 30, 2018 - Forward
Insights has published 2 new reports related to the SSD market:-
- Storage Class
Memories - "Since the announcement of 3D XPoint memory by Intel and
Micron, increased attention has been focused on alternative memory
technologies..."
see also:-
storage market researchers
who's who in the SSD
market in China?
Memory Channel
SSDs - 2013 to 2017 (timeline of stories)
radiation- tolerant SSDs - a $20 million business in 2018
already for Mercury Systems
Editor:- September 27, 2018 - Mercury Systems
announced
that it received a $9.2 million follow-on order for custom-engineered
radiation-tolerant SSDs for a defense data storage application. Mercury Systems
has received orders for this custom SSD exceeding $20 million since initial
product announcement in March of calendar year 2018.
Mercury's
entire
suite of SSD devices, including its TRRUST-Stor VPX RT device, was
engineered for the rapid commercialization of product variants meeting
customer-defined form factors, ruggedization requirements and security features.
See
also:- the business of
custom SSDs, military
SSDs
enterprise performance reports and the SSD marketers toolkit
Principled
Technologies acquires Demartek
Editor:- September 17, 2018 - There
was a time in the early
adoption years of the enterprise flash SSD / AFA market when due to the
generally poor understanding of flash by traditional rotating storage
benchmarkers and consequential
plethora of
meaningless benchmarks littering the web pages of computer publications
which had recently become aware of
the importance
of SSDs it meant that one of the business factors which could
delay the launch of products for SSD startups when their
prototypes were ready for evaluation was the difficulty in finding an external
test lab which had credibility with independent observers.
These
independent observers on the web - who needed to see plausible reports -
included the evaluation teams in systems companies who were seeking new
products to shortlist for their own inhouse tests from a disruptive market in
which for many years no one knew where the next great products might be
coming from. I was often asked by SSD startups if I could recommend such
benchmarking report writers. And I talked to customer evaluation teams too.
One of the small number of credible test labs whose published work in this
market I grew to respect in this category was Demartek
.
Well - this week I saw the
announcement
that Demartek has been acquired by a company called
Principled Technologies.
Editor's
comments:- I hadn't heard of Principled Technologies before but looking at their
client
portfolio it includes a bunch of leading (past and present) enterprise SSD
companies including Fusion-io, Seagate, Toshiba and Virident. I had already
written my introductory piece above (about how credible technical literature is
a necessity for marketing new enterprise products) before I looked at Principled
Technologies and saw that this is precisiely the service which they deliver.
See
also:- decloaking
hidden marketing segments for enterprise flash,
test systems news stories,
play it again
Sam (as time goes by) - the problem with flash write IOPS,
understanding flash
SSD performance characteristics and limitations
looking back at many years of gigs with the data recovery market
Editor:-
September 14, 2018 - Recovering data from damaged storage media (magnetic,
optical or semiconductor memory) in the absence of a usable backup is one of
those subjects which intersects with many technology disciplines.
- reliability - oems can learn about their design weaknesses by engaging
with real world failed drives
- government agencies - need to recover unique data from deliberately
or accidentally destroyed storage
- consumers - may have precious photos or documents on a drive which was
never backep up
- enterprise users - may discover that a single mode failure such as
sysadmin error, new software install or site-wide calamity has trashed their
data and backups too
- financial companies - may need to trace deliberately altered server records
Every
year at about this time when the hurricanes hit the US the data recovery pages
get a spike of readers - even though they are rarely updated. It's one of those
things which triggers mixed emotions. I'm sorry that anyone needs to look this
type of stuff up. But I'm glad if anyone finds that the articles empower them
in their onward recovery journey.
In my new home page blog on StorageSearch.com -
some
thoughts about data recovery - I look back at what I learned about this
market - where a simple transaction with a credit card can propel you straight
into high tech spook technology. ...read the
article
Burlywood announces Series A funding
Editor:-
September 12, 2018 - Burlywood
- which is developing software-defined flash controller architecture for
hyperscale data centers - today
announced
it has completed its Series A funding with proceeds totaling $10.6 million.
See also:- a
history of VCs in SSDs,
SSD software,
SSDs in the cloud
SNIA enters the computational storage market
Editor:-
September 12, 2018 - In its
SNIA
matters newsletter this month SNIA said it is forming a
new work group looking at
Computational Storage.
SNIA says - "SSDs and other storage
devices now have compute capabilities. How do such devices inform the host and
other clients, in a standard way, of their capabilities? How does the host
program these devices in a vendor neutral way? Those are some of the questions
the new Computational Storage TWG will tackle."
Editor's
comments:- as a departure from its usual way of doing things SNIA says that
during the initial phase of this work companies "do not need to be
a SNIA Member to participate."
Computational storage aka in-situ
SSD processing also associated with
processing in memory etc
was one of the
key SSD
ideas which changed in 2014 - as noted in my annual summary on
StorageSearch.com at that time.
Thinking about this new standards
discussion and engagement by SNIA I think it's likely that the most powerful
elements of computational storage will be very application specific and led by
cloud customer and proprietary AI industry platform requirements.
This
means that long before any so called "standards" emerge it may
already be clear who the leading proprietary companies in the market already
are. (As was the case during the early years of
PCIe SSDs) .
But
in the long term it will be useful to define general software frameworks
- standards - for interrogating and initializing the customizable features of
computational storage products so that a software ecosystem can grow around
doing useful things with a variety of competing intelligent memory systems
having different price points and acceleration capabilities and just enough "compatibility"
to reduce the risks on the road to inevitable mainstream adoption.
See
also:- storage industry trade
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Megabyte went through
his
Michelangelo phase.
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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.
- September 2016
- Nimbus said that
276,480 nand flash dies were used in its recently demonstrated 4.5 petabytes
(raw) 4U ExaFlash storage array.
- September 2017
- UPMEM announced series A funding for its Processing In-Memory technology
which integrates user-API accessible RISC processors as SoCs in DRAM.
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Septembers of yore in storage market history |
September 1998 - StorageSearch.com was
still in stealth mode and I was getting ready for the launch in October. What
was going through my mind at the time? I couldn't remember exactly so I looked
in my emails at that time.
Here's
what I found.
September 1999 -Western Digital
announced
the recall of 400,000 recently shipped desktop hard drives due to a
manufacturing defect found in chips supplied to WDC in the month before the
announcement which their QA assessment indicated could result in the hard
drives failing to power-up after 6 to 12 months of full-time use.
In
later years - in an SSD context - I learned that WD invested enormous resources
into verifying all the component design aspects of storage drives including how
many times they could survive being powered up and down.
In 2009 a few
quarters after WD had acquired SiliconSystems Gary Drossel,
VP of Product Planning, in WD's SSD business unit emphasized how big was the
investment made for long term testing. He joked that the large number of their
SSDs now undergoing long term tests in WD's labs would have almost made the Test
Labs one of SiliconSystems' top 10 customers not so long before.
see
also:- the
cultivation and nurturing of "reliability" in a 2.5" SSD brand
September 2001 - We'll never forget the shock to the world
of the terrorist attacks on 9/11. But in the week before that there was
the usual trickle of regular storage news from which I've picked this.
A
new product
announced
by Adtron was a 6U VMEbus form factor SCSI-2 (that's
parallel SCSI)
storage blade which could be offered with either 5.4 GBytes of flash SSD storage
or 120GBytes of hard drive storage.
You'll note here that the HDD
version has capacity which is 22x bigger than the SSD.
In
those days (2001) Adtron was making some of the highest density SSDs in the
world so you can take that comparison as a limiting ratio for the 2
technologies in a COTS context.
In 2018 (which is when I'm writing
this) those comparative ratios
are well on their way to switching to the other way round.
Today the
highest density flash storage can provide 7x as much uncompressed data capacity
as the highest density HDD in the same physical space. And once you take
compression into account (along with usable performance) the SSD to HDD
maximum usable data storage densities have changed places.
September 2002 - InfiniCon Systems
announced
the general availability of the first commercially available I/O system that
employed the new InfiniBand networking standard... marking the advent of new
data center deployment architectures.
In that press release InfiniCon
said - "Leading analyst firms have projected that approximately 50 percent
of servers shipped by 2005 will employ InfiniBand as a high-speed networking
connectivity vehicle."
Editor's comments:- As we know now that
didn't happen. But it did seem plausible at the time because earlier (in June
2001) a news story from InfiniSwitch said "Research from (a well
known company) estimates that more than 75 percent of all servers shipped
in 2004 will be shipped with InfiniBand connectivity."
It was
partly for those reasons that in a news comment (July 25, 2007) I first used
the term "Storage SoothSayers" to describe this type of vendor
leverage of market data in the early stages of technology markets. And I later
added "SoothSayer" as a semi permanent heads up alert in the
market research companies
list on StorageSearch.com in
May
2008.
SSD market predictions and interpretations in those days
were even more prone to include high degrees of uncertainty due to the
disruptive nature of the SSD market - and even when I was writing such
predictions myself.
That's why in 2013 I penned the cautionary
blog - Can
you trust SSD market data?
Going back to InfiniBand.
It
was a combination of competing alternative technologies (the increasing
number of processor cores, and faster ethernet) which meant that InfiniBand
never got near its original dreamed for market share.
See also
InfiniBand news
highlights on StorageSearch.com - 2000 to 2018.
The modern
equivalent of early InfiniBand is Gen-Z.
But you can never be too confident where markets will go. NVMe fabric is
getting better too. | | |
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