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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:- March 2010 - Although
Pliant Technology's
initial products were in the
SAS SSD market - which
once upon a time seemed like an elite uncrowded place to be - there is,
in reality, an unruly crowd of potential competitors already bustling in the
adjacent FC SSD and
SATA SSD segments
wearing the same 2.5"
SSD and 3.5" SSD
form factors - which could easily enter the
SAS market if they
chose to do so.
And the customers of Pliant's customers also compete for user mind share
with vendors in the rackmount
SSD and PCIe SSD
markets.
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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.
"We
tested Lightning EFDs under conditions that closely mirrored the data throughput
demands of today's mission-critical data centers..." said Bob Weisickle,
CEO and founder of OakGate. "..even more impressive was the fact that
these phenomenal performance numbers remained stable and consistent over
time, which is a critical requirement for today's mission-critical 24x7 data
centers."
Editor's comments:- when (like me) you're used to seeing SSD
IOPS that
look like telephone numbers, and IOPS that have a
lot of GB/s in them
you have ask yourself - what is this vendor really saying?
I think the
point Pliant is making is that if you are an oem who wants to design a
rackmount flash
SSD which has the performance potential of a proprietary architecture such as
Texas Memory Systems,
or an array of PCIe SSDs
such as Fusion-io,
but you want to stay in the comfort zone of
SAS SSDs while avoiding
the "EMC use it so
it must be expensive" feel associated
STEC - please take a
look another look at their products. The tag line on their home page says "Do
more for less." (I've seen worse.) I've seen
better SSD videos
though. It was another 6 minutes of my life wasted (compared to reading the
text). | |
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| the Problem with
Write IOPS - in flash SSDs |
Repeating write
operations in some apps
and some flash SSDs can take orders of
magnitude longer than predicted
by IOPS
benchmarks and latency specs.
Time goes by - in
the "play it again Sam"
scene intrinsic to databases -
discrediting
long established performance modeling metrics. | |
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| We have
hundreds
of SSD articles on StorageSearch.com |
Here, below, are some
examples.
- SSD
Market History - lists product and technology milestones in the 30 years of
the SSD market upto the end of 2009.
- RAM Cache
Ratios in flash SSDs - it's important to know the underlying RAM cache
architecture - even if you're happy with the R/W and IOPS performance.
- 2010 - 1st Fizz
in the SSD Bubble? - even the dogs in the street know this is going to be a
multibillion dollar market. Greed will play as big a part as technology in
shaping the
SSD year ahead.
- the pros and cons of
using SSD ASAPs - auto tuning SSD appliances are a new category of SSD
which entered the market in the 2nd half of 2009 to accelerate servers without
needing human tune-ups. How can you tell if they are right for you? And how
well do they work?
- the Problem
with Write IOPS - in flash SSDs - long established as a useful performance
modeling metric - this article explains why some specs are exaggerated when
applied to flash SSDs - or predict the wrong results for many common
applications.
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