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Dataram Launches
Resellable SSD
Editor:- September 28, 2009 - Dataram launched the
XcelaSAN
- a fast 2U
rackmount flash SSD with 450,000 random IOPS performance (assuming 50/50
R/W and 4k blocks), and upto 8x 4Gbps FC ports - aimed at the
SAN application
acceleration market. Pricing starts at $65,000 for a unit with approx 360GB
internal flash, of which 128GB is effectively used as a cache.
"It
is now well understood that the benefit of a solid state infrastructure for
compute-intensive environments is higher application performance with less
equipment and lower operational costs," said Jason Caulkins, Dataram Chief
Technologist. "The question is no longer 'How can I benefit from solid
state storage?' but 'How do I best implement solid state in my existing
infrastructure?' With XcelaSAN, we enable organizations with performance
intensive applications to seamlessly add a dynamic, intelligent solid state
storage tier to their existing SAN environment."
Editor's
comments:- At 1st glance this product looks like many others which have
aimed at the traditional market of SAN users. But its revolutionary design opens
a new market which has been inaccessible to traditional
FC SSD vendors.
Dataram's product includes proprietary software - which does away with the need
for an SSD expert engineer to identify hotspots and relocate critical data. The
company says the XcelaSAN will automatically learn and self optimize during the
1st few hours of operation - and it will maintain application speedups even
when applications and loads change - which is not possible with human tuned
systems.
The search for a self tuning agnostic SSD software layer
which sits between a SAN server and conventional rotating disk bulk storage has
been the Holy Grail of SSD oems for over a decade. None have actually achieved
it - till now. Although many vendors have developed semi-automated tuning kits
and strategies for common applications - they require considerable expertise on
the part of the applications engineer to make them work well. That has slowed
down the adoption rate of SSDs in many midsized organizations which don't have a
big enough installed base to attract the star SSD talent to look at their
problems. And it's also why SSD accelerators, have not been viable as a
reseller product.
When I spoke to Dataram's CTO, Jason Caulkins, I was
impressed by the depth of marketing thinking behind the new product launch.
Dataram realized that simply launching a me-too SSD box would have an
uncertain outcome in a market that's already so crowded. And Dataram's corporate
memory goes back over 30 years to pioneering SSDs for minicomputers which
they launched in
1976. But
all memory companies know that in the future SSDs will use more memory than
traditional markets - such as server or pc motherboards. So it's important to
stake out ground in the SSD market.
I asked - where did the technology
come from? Jason said some of it came from Dataram's acquisition of
Cenatek - where he had
already been thinking about the SSD business model problem for many years. With
much bigger resources available after Dataram's acquisition - he's had teams of
software engineers working on the XcelaSAN concepts and licensed essential glue
where needed.
Will it work? Dataram says the XcelaSAN has been tested
and working in customer sites. Product shipments in the US start in the next
quarter. And the product is storage agnostic - meaning the customer can replace
their SAN arrays at a future date and retain the acceleration speedup. XcelaSAN
seems to offer a viable route for mid-budget user enterprises - who have
been neglected by SSD vendors for economic reasons - to join the march of the
SSD Revolution.
Is it competitive? - If you use my quick and dirty
magic number for SSD sever accelerators - (write IOPS divided by cost per TB) -
it's in the same order of magnitude as leading PCIe SLC flash SSD cards - so
it's definitely worth a look.
WD Starts Volume Shipments of 2TB Enterprise Hard Drives
Editor:-
September 1, 2009 - Western
Digital announced that it's
shipping
3.5" 7,200 RPM 2TB hard drives and is qualifying with OEMs
enterprise-class
hard drives based on WD's 500GB per-platter technology.
The new
drives use dual actuator technology. A head positioning system with 2 actuators
that improves positional accuracy over the data track(s). The primary actuator
provides coarse displacement using conventional electromagnetic actuator
principles. The secondary actuator uses piezoelectric motion to fine tune the
head positioning to a higher degree of accuracy.
Editor's comments:- 2TB enterprise hard drives (available
from multiple sources)
will rapidly become the new building blocks for enterprise bulk storage.
Dot Hill announced back
in July it had
qualified
the new 2TB WD drive. Many other
RAID systems companies
this month will follow suit and start shipments of 2TB populated arrays.
the Top 10 SSD OEMs
Editor:- July 7, 2009 -
StorageSearch.com today
published the 9th quarterly edition of
the Top 10 SSD OEMs
- based on search volume in Q 2009.
Who are the top 10 most
important SSD manufacturers - the companies which you absolutely have to look at
if you've got got any new projects involving SSDs? With over 155 oems
now in the SSD market - this article with its commentary and analysis is a must
read. ...read the
article
Notebook SSD Market Overview - is not pretty
Editor:-
June 15, 2009 - StorageSearch.com
published a new article today called -
Overview of
the Notebook SSD Market.
There's a simple way to summarize
the complex view of the SSD Notebook / Netbook market.
Lots of
initial hype and optimism that the market would deliver an astonishingly
new product experience to users, followed by dismay and disillusion due to
a flurry of poorly conceived, badly designed and ineptly executed products.
...read the
article
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| DDRdrive
Launches Low Cost PCIe RAM SSD |
Editor:- May 4, 2009 - DDRdrive emerged from
stealth mode and launched the
DDRdrive X1 - a
PCIe compatible
RAM SSD with onboard
flash backup.
Load / restore time is 60S. I/O performance is over
200K IOPS (for 512B blocks). For 4kB blocks IOPS is:- 50k (reads) and 35K
(writes). R/W throughput is 215MB/s and 155MB/s respectively. Capacity is
4GB. OS compatibility:- Microsoft Windows (various). Price is $1,495.
Using
Microsoft Windows built-in RAID
support, DDRdrive X1's can be spanned (capacity), striped (performance),
mirrored (redundancy), and RAID-5 configured.
Editor's comments:-
the DDRdrive X1 looks competitively priced for accelerating database
applications in which the hot files can be squeezed into a capacity range from
about 4GB to 12GB. Above that - you get into the region of entry level
rackmount SSDs
and high performance PCIe
flash SSD cards
from companies like Fusion-io
and Texas Memory Systems.
There's definitely a gap in the market for this scale of product (low
entry price, low capacity - high IOPS). For the past year or so DDRdrive
shipped an earlier generation of its SSD accelerators exclusively to a large
enterprise for secret internal projects.
New Guide for SSD Wannabies
Editor:- April 28, 2009
- StorageSearch.com
published a new article today called -
"3 Easy Ways to
Enter the SSD Market."
Nowadays it seems like everyone wants
to get into the SSD market. This tells you how to do it. ...read the article
How Bad is - Choosing the Wrong SSD Supplier?
Editor:-
March 24, 2009 - I've published a article called -
How Bad is - Choosing
the Wrong SSD Supplier?
I've spoken to countless
VCs, oems and
end-users about how difficult it is to know you've got the best
SSD company in your sights
as a potential acquisition
target, supplier or technology partner. If you know what you're doing - it takes
time. And in the past 9 weeks while you've been doing that - another 30 new
companies have entered the SSD market to make things more complicated. It's a
big decision. How big a deal - if you decide later - it was the wrong choice?
Trust me. We live in difficult times. The vampires are coming. If the
pointy stick breaks you
may not get another chance. ...read the article
After SSDs? - Predicting the Storage Market's Next Obsession
Editor:-
March 12, 2009 - StorageSearch.com
has published a new article -
After SSDs... What
Next?
It looks beyond the next 3 years of hoopla in the
SSD market and predicts
what will be the next "big thing" in storage after that. ...read the article,
SSD market research &
analysts
flash SSD Jargon Explained
Editor:- February 25, 2009 - understanding the list of ingredients
inside flash SSDs - is as important as knowing what you can do with them -
and
a new article published
today on
StorageSearch.com tries to hit this fast moving target.
"Just
as some foods are healthier than others - so too some SSDs are better suited
for particular applications" says editor Zsolt Kerekes.
"Better
user education about SSDs is a critical factor for the industry to sustain its
growth. Design tradeoffs in products go far deeper than the choice of memory
and interface. Being aware that there are other parameters which SSD vendors
have implemented well, badly (or not at all) can be the difference between a
satisfactory or disillusionary experience." ...read the article | |
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Can You
Trust Flash SSD Specs & Benchmarks? |
| Sadly no! - Many
published benchmarks for flash SSD are about as reliable as bank
valuations of Collateralized Loan Obligations (just before the onset of the
Credit Crunch). |
There are many
intrinsic technical reasons why you can't believe most published benchmarks
for flash SSDs (whether done by magazines or vendors) and why
even the tests you carefully do yourself don't give reliable results
which correlate with how the SSD will perform in real-life
applications.
We warned you of it this problem here
on StorageSearch.com - and now other publications and vendors are starting
to take it seriously too. ...read
the article | | |
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SSD Bookmarks
suggested
by - Gary
Drossel, VP of Product Planning, WD Solid State Storage |
Here's an article written by or
about WD Solid State Storage
NAND
Evolution and its Effects on SSD Useable Life
Gary Drossel says he
chose this article because reliability is the main driving force for WD Solid
State Storage and its customers.
The article shows why calculations
based on models of flash SSD writes in 24/7 applications can result in wear-out
estimates which are over optimistic by an order of magnitude due to write
amplification and wear-leveling inefficiency. That's why the company recommends
using the real-time endurance data logging tool (SiSMART) built into its
SiliconDrives for a day, week or month, in a prototype / pilot system before
full-scale deployment. The data collected can be used to either confirm that
there is adequate safety margin in the application - or used to initiate
software or other system design changes to adjust the extrapolated life within
acceptable limits.
Other SSD article suggestions...
Solid State Storage Initiative -
published by SNIA
Gary
Drossel says he recommends this bookmark because - "It discusses SNIA
activities relative to bringing SSD technology into the data center. And it has
links to a couple of white papers, articles and research resources about solid
state storage."
Editor:- thanks Gary for sharing your SSD links.
see also:-
WD
Solid State Storage - editor mentions on StorageSearch.com | | |
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