| SAN news |
Dataram's revenue up 70% -
increases investment in SSD ASAP
Editor:- July 29, 2010 - today
Dataram
reported that its annual revenue for the year ended April 30 grew 70%
to $44 million incurring a net loss of $1.6 million.
Among other
things, Dataram's president and CEO - John H. Freeman commented on the company's
SSD ASAP.
"The development of our
XcelaSAN product line
continues to progress... In August, we plan to release enhanced features and
functionality which are currently in development to support sales initiatives.
These changes increase the products ease of use, ease of installation and
interoperability.
"High Availability systems are expected to be
available for sale in December. We anticipate that our enhancements and the
shipment of high availability systems will accelerate product sales and broaden
market adoption. We have made and are continuing to make significant
investments in research and development in XcelaSAN. In part, this
investment is being used to develop and implement client recommendations based
on their actual test experiences."
Compression-past company acquired by IBM
Editor:-
July 29, 2010 -
Storewiz
announced a definitive
agreement to be acquired by IBM.
Editor's
comments:- Storewiz's real-time compression technology was
predicated
on a legacy model in which there were no
SSDs (compression-past).
This was a short sighted market view - because SSD IOPS will enable new types of
storage array economics - as discussed in my article
Reaching for the
petabyte SSD (compression-future).
IBM's acquisition may have short
term tactical benefits for the company - and help them collect some patent
license fees but is otherwise irrelevant.
SANpulse announces 280% revenue growth for storage migration
Editor:-
July 15, 2010 -
SANpulse today
announced revenue
growth of 280% in the 1st and 2nd quarters of 2010 compared to the year
ago quarters.
This results from continued Fortune 500 enterprise
adoption of the company's
SANlogics solution to
simplify and automate storage migration and data center consolidation. In 2010
SANpulse reached new technology deployment milestones, transforming and
optimizing more than 25,000 servers attached to over 40PB of data.
Editor's
comments:- It's especially impressive growth for a company who has
zero
occurrences of the word "SSD" on its website.
It
demonstrates that the storage
market universe is very big indeed.
Though not as big as the web
universe. Take a look at this interesting article -
Want More
Readers? Try Expanding Your Internet Universe - on
Copyblogger.com - in which I
recognized the eternal truth of author Brian Clark's observation that "Someone
out there in the Internet-universe is struggling with something you learned 3
years ago."
Yeah. Who would have thought all that all that
nichey SSD
endurance and SSD
reliability stuff would ever be of interest to a mass audience? Those SSD
articles were published 5 years ago. Guess I'll have to wait another 5 years
before some of my more recent articles - like
this way to the
Petabyte SSD - strike the right chord.
See also:- Solaris
Migration - resources and articles.
SSD tuning is not "set and forget"
Editor:-
July 14, 2010 - a regular correspondent asked for my comments about a recent
article -
Driving
Down Storage Complexity with SSD - by George Crump, founder of
Storage Switzerland.
I
was surprised to see - that in its enthusiasm for SSD - the article contains
a potentially misleading statement:- "SSD is as close to a 'set
it and forget it' option that storage I/O performance tuning has."
In my view - this statement is only true in 2 cases.
1
- that 100% of the data is put in the SSD - which is extremely rare in
enterprise apps, and
2 - that the SSD is an
ASAP
In
all other cases - SSD tuning needs to be revisited whenever the shape of the
data or the ratio of SSD to HDD changes. In the worst case the tuning can
drift from the ideal and offer no worthwhile acceleration whatsoever.
This
error comes in an article which come from a respected author whose other work
- has in fact - been cited in the
SSD Bookmarks . It
shows we can all make mistakes when we get carried away by the flow of our prose
- and ignore the reality of the analysis - which sometimes tells a more complex
story. See also:-
SSD training and
education guide.
Kaminario launches RAM SSD ASAP
Editor:- June 14,
2010 - Kaminario
launched its 1st product - an FC
SAN connected acceleration appliance in which
a
grid of blade servers access upto terabytes of shared memory.
Pricing
starts at $200,000
Editor's comments:- the applications
speedups quoted by Kaminario are similar to the best figures achieved by high
end rackmount SSDs from NextIO,
Texas Memory Systems
and Violin Memory.
Kaminario
doesn't call its product an SSD - but it integrates
techniques which
have been used by SSD customers for many years - to place data hot spots into
memory.
Unlike a vanilla
RAM SSD - the company
says the data deployment is done automatically and transparently by its
proprietary OS. Kaminario's product isn't an
SSD - but conceptually the
best way to understand what it does is to think of it as a
RAM SSD ASAP. The
exact speedup and cost effectiveness achieved by this type of product is
highly application sensitive. Another similar product (which bundles servers
with massive memory) is the Oracle-focused
OPERA from Texas Memory
Systems.
Accusys wins award for PCIe SAN
Editor:- May 26, 2010
- Accusys today
announced
that its ExaSAN has won the prestigious "Best Choice" of Computex Award in the category
of Data Storage Products.
Judges selected ExaSAN from a pool of more
than 400 products from 170 oems based on the criteria of innovation,
technical merit, and marketability.
ExaSAN connects 2x
RAID systems (upto 96
SAS/SATA disks) through a
PCIe switch to form a SAN-like
system with upto 80Gb/s bandwidth. Optimized features for the video market
include "Equalization Mode" which the company says ensures smoother
consecutive I/Os to prevent real-time frame dropping in editing applications.
See also:- PCIe
SSDs.
DCIG publishes buyers guide - midrange storage array market
Editor:-
May 11, 2010 - DCIG
has published the
DCIG Midrange Array
Buyer's Guide (100+ pages) which contains product information on over 70
different midrange arrays from 20 storage providers.
DCIG says the
guide is intended to narrow down the playing field to develop a list of
competitive products that have comparable features to meet specific application
or business needs. Developed to be the go-to resource for IT professionals, the
guide provides direct comparisons of storage systems classified as midrange
arrays and delivers insight into the range of offerings available on the market.
New for 2010, the DCIG Midrange Array Buyer's Guide provides product
comparisons among the widest range of storage array options and identifies the
winners and losers across five categories, including FC/iSCSI,
FC only,
iSCSI only, hardware and
software.
Pricing ranges from $5,000 for 1 print copy - upto $20,000 which
includes:- internal distribution, 1 hour of analyst debriefing and marketing
citation rights.
enterprise SSD market growth will accelerate - says Objective
Analysis
Editor:- April 27, 2010 - Objective Analysis
has published a new 104 page market report -
Data
Centers Drive Major SSD Growth (
$5,000)
which concludes that "the stunning growth of
SSDs in enterprise servers
and storage systems is only going to get stronger."
The company
finds that the enterprise SSD market is likely to approach $4 billion in
revenues by 2015,
nearly 17x times that of 2009, while unit shipments will increase by
50x during that period to over 4 million units.
How does this
compare to other predictions?
Click here to
StorageSearch.com's directory of
recommended SSD analysts.
TMS ships 10TB 500K IOPS 3U SLC SSD
Editor:- April
8, 2010 - Texas
Memory Systems today
announced the
availability of the
RamSan-630 an
FC /
InfiniBand
compatible 3U
SLC SSD with 4 to 10TB capacity, 500,000
IOPS,
8GB/s bandwidth, and R/W latency of 250 / 80 microseconds in a 450W power
budget.
Levi Norman, Director of Marketing and OEM for Texas Memory
Systems explained the rationale behind the new product - "We developed
it in response to observing how customers were struggling to boost performance
without adding to their data center footprint. The explosive growth in IT and
storage over the years is resulting in many data centers reaching their limits
for space and power draw."
GreenBytes unveils 1U dedupe ASAP
Editor:- March 29,
2010 - GreenBytes
today
unveiled
the GB-1000 (under $10,000)
a 1U 4TB SSD accelerated
dedupe appliance
which supports simultaneous SAN
and NAS deployments.
Ingest
and restore performance is stated as 0.54TB/hr.
San Francisco's KPIX Deploys SAN Solutions' Video Production SAN
Editor:-
March 16, 2010 - SAN
Solutions today announced
that its
Video
Production SAN is being used by San Francisco television station
KPIX to
enable file-based production of its Emmy Award-winning HD news magazine show, "Eye On The Bay."
FalconStor tunes Violin's SSD
Editor:- March 2,
2010 - FalconStor
today announced
technical
and VAR channel support for Violin Memory's 2U
rackmount FC flash SSD
- the Violin 1010 .
Although
the headline specs of this very fast flash SSD are substantially the same as
when it was launched in
November 2008
the 2 important things which have changed are:-
- the price point
- $32,000 for the 500GB (lite capacity) version, and
- the availability of SSD
ASAP-like features implemented by FalconStor's SafeCache and HotZone
software.
Tiering SAN Shifts Real Estate without Costly Tears
Editor:-
February 22, 2010 - Compellent
published a
case
study (pdf) - which shows the benefits of
automated
tiering
SAN storage - applied to
the online marketing of real estate.
Demonstrating the flexibility of
Compellent's "Fluid Architecture" their customer -
WhereToLive.com - is quoted as saying
- "With the Compellent system... I'm able to get a million-dollar SAN
over time and without that one-time million-dollar capital expenditure."
What
is Fluid Architecture? - Compellent's VP of marketing, Bruce Kornfeld,
explains...
"Compellent'sFluid Data storage
enables automated tiering at a granular level between any drive technology,
speed and even RAID level.
Shifting data between SSD,
FC,
SATA, and
SAS works quietly
and unobtrusively in the background. Businesses want a "set it and forget
it approach" and that's why automated tiering has proven popular –
because it saves customers a lot on disk drives, space and power costs. The fact
that most large, legacy storage vendors are now introducing their own solutions
only validate that customers are asking for automated tiered storage. Automatic
tiering is one party no storage vendor can afford to miss."
Editor's
comments:- this month is the
8th anniversary of
the "Affordable SAN Initiative." Like
$$Ds - there's
affordable and AFFORDABLE.
Good Blogs from Xiotech
Editor:- February 15, 2010 -
the Great Shrinking Disc Drive
is a new blog by Rob Peglar at Xiotech.
In
this context - I have to clarify that Peglar is talking about the enterprise
market shrinking towards 2.5"
hard drives - and not
the kind of shrink I had in mind when I said the whole hard drive market would
shrink to nothing.
I've
only just started to read through his back catalog of articles today. My
favorite so far is his January 2010 article -
Performance (Still) Matters -
in which Rob Peglar says - "...there's only 24 hours in a day, and that
is the inexorable limit we all battle."
I often think that if I
had 25 hours in each day - but everyone else was limited to just 24 - I'd do a
better job. And while we're on this subject - if I could be in 2 places at
once...
New Integrity Tool for Old Tape Archives
Editor:-
January 18, 2010 - Crossroads
Systems today
announced
details of ArchiveVerify - a new monitoring option for its
ReadVerify Appliance
that safeguards the future readability of data
backed up on
tape.
"In our experience, the Achilles' heel of a data recovery
strategy is often the uncertainty of the data's readability, and this single
point of failure can render then entire restore process useless," adds
Bernd Krieger, Managing Director, at Crossroads Europe.
Editor's comments:- Crossroads was originally a specialist in
the SAN router business.
In recent years it has done a lot of work in the area of
storage reliability.
I've read lots of their whitepapers which describe their research and products
addressing data integrity. Although there has been a historic trend for users
to migrate away from
tape to disk backup - many super users of huge
tape libraries (with the
biggest archives) will be the last to migrate away - due to logistics and cost.
It's those kind of users who can benefit most from automated tools or services
which increase the data integrity they achieve and cut down media waste and
unrecoverable events.
New Directory for AoE Storage
Editor:- January 15,
2010 - StorageSearch.com
today published a new directory for
AoE (ATA-over-Ethernet)
Storage.
$9 million Funding Round for flash SSD Enabled SAN Backup
Editor:-
November 18, 2009 - Axxana
announced it has
secured $9 million Series B
investment led by Carmel Ventures.
Axxana's existing investors, Gemini
Israel Funds and the serial entrepreneur
Moshe Yanai,
also participated in the round.
The funds will be used to accelerate
the adoption of The Phoenix System - the first "Black Box" Enterprise
Data Recorder which was demonstrated at EMC
World in May 2009.
"Axxana's EDR brings a disruptive solution that is well poised
to transform the entire storage replication market and create a whole new
category within it," said Ronen Nir, Partner at Carmel Ventures. "We
are impressed with Axxana's strong founding team and their achievements so far,
including impressive endorsement by leading storage vendors worldwide."
Editor's comments:- Axxana's solution is a lossless data
recovery system which sits on the
SAN and records data into a
rugged flash
SSD-enabled, locally situated, data survival box. Although Axxana talks
about it "complementing" other types of data protection - such as
offsite / online backup
my gut feel is that if the product shows itself to be usable and
reliable in a wide
range of environments - it will set a new standard for
backup which will
supercede anything possible with rotating
disk backup systems or
tape.
The
clearest explanation is in
Axxana's datasheet
(pf) from which I've taken these snippets.
"Axxana's solution
combines concepts used in airplane Flight Data Recorders (Black Box) with newly
developed materials and technologies to create a hardened "Enterprise Data
Recorder" storage system capable of withstanding extreme conditions to
preserve business data in the event of a disaster... The Phoenix system was
designed to survive calamitous events such as Earthquake, Weather, Floods, Fire,
and the consequences of a terror attack. The system was successfully tested and
meets international standards for various threat scenarios."
ASAPs Webinar
Editor:- November 10, 2009 - Dataram is running a
webinar next week (November 18) -
Navigating
the Maze of Solid State Storage Solutions.
The company says
viewers will discover - "How to better gauge your storage traffic to
identify bottlenecks and areas where solid state storage can provide a day 1
positive ROI."
Editor's comments:- as I said earlier - StorageSearch.com
will soon publish a new guide to ASAPs (Auto-tuning SSD Accelerated Pools of
storage) - and I'm rounding up content and comments on this subject. But the
webinar, above, takes place before our new guide will be published.
Expect 16GFC by 2011 - says FCIA
Editor:- October
20, 2009 - the Fibre
Channel Industry Association announced its has completed the technical
work on
16Gb/s
Fibre Channel (16GFC) - which provides a natural value migration from 8GFC.
Product
roll-outs are anticipated in 2011 according to FCIA Chairman - Skip Jones.
Editor's
comments:- I first published a directory of Fibre-channel adapters way back
in 1994. The first FC connected storage array product listed in that
was the
SPARCstorageArray
from
Sun Microsystems.
It's reassuring that users in the FC market can anticipate another
level of performance evolution - but FC is no longer a growth market. So this
could be the last post for FC - just as
15K RPM
was the end of the road for hard disks.
For dispersed systems
ethernet based storage (NAS)
long ago became the dominant network storage connect - while for local use and
higher performance InfiniBand
and PCIe have taken
hold in distinct functional pockets.
Dataram eliminates waits for the SSD Hot Shot / Hot Spot Engineer
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 start 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.
ATTO Demos 6,400MB/s HBA at IBC
Editor:- September
10, 2009 - ATTO
Technology is
demonstrating
its 6Gb/s SAS HBAs
and 8Gb/s Fibre Channel HBAs this week at IBC
in Amsterdam .
Demos include a quad-channel card that delivers the
fastest available Fibre
Channel data transfer rate of 6,400MB/s. Storage Events,
Record Breaking
Storage
TMS Acquires SAN IP from Incipient
Editor:- September
8, 2009 - Texas Memory Systems
has expanded its IP base with the
acquisition of data
management patents and source code from Incipient.
"The
patents and software provide Texas Memory Systems with a new set of tools for
virtualisation and storage management that complement our solid state storage
systems," said Woody
Hutsell, President at Texas Memory Systems. "The newly-acquired
technology will accelerate our development of new high-performance storage that
meets the demanding and complex needs of our enterprise customers."
Texas Memory Systems has not acquired any interest in Incipient, Inc. Both
companies remain independent.
EMC Acquires Kazeon
Editor:- September 1, 2009 -
EMC today
announced it has
signed a definitive agreement to
acquire privately-held
Kazeon Systems.
Core to Kazeon's
eDiscovery
attractiveness is its ability to handle data that resides anywhere in the
enterprise environment - including content on laptops, desktops, content
management repositories, email archives and file shares.
RAID Systems Get 2TB WD Drives
Editor:- September 1,
2009 - Dot Hill
and Pillar Data Systems
are in the 1st wave of companies who have recently started volume
shipments of RAID systems
using 3.5" 2TB 7,200 RPM hard drives from Western Digital.
The
new drives were announced in
April 2009. |
| Storage History................................................................. | |
|
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| . |
| There
are
hundreds
of articles about SSDs on StorageSearch.com |
Here, below, are some
examples.
- 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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the Fastest Solid State
Disks
Speed isn't everything, and it comes at a price. |
But if
you do need the6speediest
SSD then wading through the web sites of over 90 current
SSD oems to find a suitable
candidate slows you down.
And the SSD search problem will get even
worse. |
 | |
| I've
done the research for you to save you time. And this page is updated daily from
storage news and direct
inputs from oems. ...read
the article, | |
| . |
 |
NAS,
DAS or SAN? - Choosing the Right Storage Technology for Your Organization -
article by Xtore
It's 8 years since we published the
Storage Architecture
Guide a classic reference written by the world's first network storage
company Auspex. The new overview article from Xtore places the main storage
connection strategies in a current context. Here's an extract.
"Another
important consideration for a medium sized business or large enterprise is
heterogeneous data sharing. With DAS, each server is running its own operating
platform, so there is no common storage in an environment that may include a mix
of Windows, Mac and Linux workstations. NAS systems can integrate into any
environment and serve files across all operating platforms. On the network, a
NAS system appears like a native file server to each of its different clients.
That means that files are saved on the NAS system, as well as retrieved from the
NAS system, in their native file formats. NAS is also based on industry standard
network protocols such as TCP/IP, FC and CIFS. " ... read the article,
...Xtore profile | |
| . |
More articles about SANs
Here are some more articles we
published on STORAGEsearch related to storage area networks.
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