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Pliant Technology

Pliant Technology is developing Enterprise Flash Drives (EFDs), a new class of solid state storage devices that integrate seamlessly into enterprise information systems and dramatically improve performance, reliability, energy efficiency, and TCO. Delivering breakthrough improvements over today's highest performing hard drive and SSD storage solutions for a range of data I/O intensive enterprise applications, Pliant's solution is expected to be available to OEM and datacenter customers in the fourth quarter of 2008. The company was founded by a team of successful storage executives and engineers from Fujitsu, IBM, Maxtor, Quantum, and Seagate. Pliant is based in Milpitas, Calif. More information is available at www.plianttechnology.com.

see also:- Pliant Technology - editor mentions on STORAGEsearch.com

  • editor's comments:- September 2010 - Pliant is a significant company. Their search volume stats put them in at #13 in 2010 Q2 which is good in a crowd of nearly 200 SSD oems and SoC companies that we track. They were late to enter the SSD market (1st sample products September 2009) and their initial products are 2.5" and 3.5" SAS SSDs - initially SLC (and now MLC too for better value in video servers). See more comments about this move below.

    14 companies already market SAS SSDs or have said they will do so. So it looks like a small cozy niche. But if revenue in that segment picks up any one of more than 100 or so flash SSD oems could easily produce a fast SAS SSD within 3 months using a bridge chip and Sandforce controller making it look more look like the SATA SSD market.

    Pliant competes head to head for design sockets with the long established 2.5" SAS SSD leader STEC. But looking at the wider picture - Pliant's ideal customers compete with well established PCIe SSDs (within the DAS enterprise acceleration market) and racknmount SSDs in the SAN and NAS acceleration markets.

Pliant's recent milestones in SSD market history

In March 2009 - Pliant Technology's VP of Marketing, Greg Goelz shared his SSD Bookmarks in the opening episode of StorageSearch.com's new classic series.

Also in March 2009 - Pliant Technology announced it has received $15 million in Series C funding. This will be used as working capital to support volume production of its SAS compatible flash SSDs.

In September 2009 - Pliant Technology started sampling its Lightning family of 2.5" (150GB) and 3.5" (300GB) skinny flash SAS SSDs. The SLC drives deliver R/W rates upto 525/340MB/s and 160,000 IOPS (for a 90% R, 10% W mix).


The realistically addressable market for native SAS SSDs in disk form factors looks a lot smaller today than 3 years ago when Pliant was founded. That's because SAS SSD opportunities have been shunted aside by PCIe SSDs and squeezed from below by fast SATA SSDs.

The result has been that SSD vendors have been reluctant to enter this part of market. But the good news for the handful of companies actually shipping such products is they don't have to worry about dozens of competitors going for every design slot. That means higher margins for the forseeable future.

In March 2010 - Pliant Technology published benchmark results to illustrate the capability of its 3.5" SAS SSDs when used in arrays. The measurements performed and validated by OakGate Technology were performed on an array of 16 SSDs and are summarized in a video.

In April 2010 - Pliant Technology announced the appointment of Frank Kull as VP of operations. He brings more than 15 years of experience in operations management for Google, Cisco Systems and other leading technology companies.

SSD companies Avere Systems and Pliant Technology were 2 of 5 companies named in an 8 page report published by Gartner - Cool Vendors in Storage Technologies, 2010 ($495).

Neither Pliant nor STEC found homes in the SAS SSD sockets of a new rackmount system launched by Nimbus Data Systems this month. Instead Nimbus designed its own - because it's easy to do - and much cheaper.

In August 2010 - Pliant Technology announced the appointment of Mark Delsman as VP of engineering. Prior to joining Pliant, Delsman was VP of software engineering for Dot Hill.

In September 2010 - Pliant Technology announced it is sampling MLC versions of its 2.5" SAS SSD family with upto 400GB capacity and >10K sustained IOPS.

Editor's comments:- new dynasty SSD maker Fusion-io has successfully demonstrated that there is a healthy market appetite for MLC SSDs in some "enterprise apps". How many is "some"? Enough to make a VC wake up in your powerpoint presentation!

Most new 2.5" SSD makers are taking the opposite route to Pliant in that the majority started with consumer grade (MLC) SSD products with SATA interfaces and are busily reworking their products to add SAS (spelt $A$) so they can charge higher prices.

Pliant - on the other hand - made a conservative choice by launching only SLC SSDs when it started sampling its 1st SSDs 12 months ago. Will Pliant add SATA SSDs to its line up too? - Unlikely it could survive in that fiercely competitive market. But if the company is still around in another 12 months - I wouldn't be surprised to see them extend their range with a PCIe SSD. Because you have to give enterprise customers what they want. Even if the market appears inconsistent about what it wants. If the money is there you have to pay attention.
the problem with flash SSD  write IOPS
the Problem with Write IOPS - in flash SSDs
This article explains why some specs are
exaggerated or predict the wrong results.
.
read the article about SSD integrity written by SandForce
Data Integrity Challenges in flash SSD Design
Editor:- Data Integrity Challenges in flash SSD Design is an article - written by Kent Smith Senior Director, Product Marketing, SandForce.

Reliability is the next new thing for SSD designers and users to start worrying about.
read the article about SSD integrity A common theme you will hear from all fast SSD companies is that the faster you make an SSD go - the more effort you have to put into understanding and engineering data integrity to eliminate the risk of "silent errors." ...read the article
.
What's the best way to design a flash SSD?

and other questions which divide SSD opinion
More than 10 key areas of fundamental disagreement within the SSD industry are discussed in an article here on StorageSearch.com called the the SSD Heresies.
click to read the article - the SSD Heresies ... Why can't SSD's true believers agree upon a single coherent vision for the future of solid state storage? ...read the article
.

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