| see also:-
SandForce
- editor mentions on StorageSearch.com
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- editor's comments:- December 2011 - SandForce is the best known
maker of
SSD controllers - and
has achieved high rankings in StorageSearch.com's quarterly rankings of the
top 10 SSD oems since
early 2009 - when the company emerged from stealth mode.
By talking
openly about its SSD controller technology - SandForce has garnered interest
from many stakeholders outside the set of those oems who may want to directly
use its chip technology. Although not explicitly stated in this way - the
company has cleverly leveraged the concept of "SSDs with SandForce inside".
Therefore end-users who want to peek ahead at the
SSD performance market
roadmap can get a realistic idea of what may be coming - even if they aren't
in the market for SandForce based products. (Many quarters after these comments
were 1st published SandForce did launch an official branding program. See
historic milestones below.)
SandForce was the 1st company to offer
symmetric R/W
IOPS in a 2.5" flash SSD form factor.
Who competes with
SandForce?
Although SandForce's market is high performance SSD
controllers - their main competitors are other companies which sell high
performance SSDs. That's because those competing SSD oems compete with
SandForce's own customers - so if the alternative architectures sell more - then
the size of the pot for SF partners reduces.
In the
2.5" SSD market
SF's main competitors are:- STEC,
SanDisk,
Hitachi GST (WD), and
BiTMICRO.
In
the PCIe SSD market -
SF / LSI's strongest competitors are:-
Fusion-io,
Virident Systems,
Texas Memory Systems
and STEC. |
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|
In April 2009 -
SandForce unveiled
its SF-1000 family of SSD
Processors - aimed at oems building
SATA flash SSDs. Its
2.5" SSD reference design kit is the fastest
2.5" SATA flash
SSD on the market - with 250MB/s symmetric R/W throughput and 30,000 R/W IOPS.
I
asked SandForce's President & CEO, Alex Naqvi,
for more details about the various package of technologies which are bundled
in the company's "DuraClass Technology" - which achieves impressively
high IOPS without relying on over-provisioning or large external RAM caches. In
particular I wondered what part, if any its choice of processor SoC (from
Tensilica) had to play.
Alex
Naqvi explained - DuraClass performance doesn't come from the choice of
processor - but in the way that they have integrated various design techniques
with very fast hardware (proprietary chips) which the company has designed to
accelerate the core bottleneck functions of a
flash SSD controller.
In concert with other techniques, such as the ability to reorder
data before it is written to flash (thereby attenuating
write endurance
by 2 orders of magnitude), RAID
like internal protection and very fast garbage collection SandForce's
DuraClass Technology results in small form factor enterprise class flash SSDs
which have no daily write limits for MLC flash and symmetric R/W IOPS.
In
June 2009 - SandForce's VP marketing, Thad Omura published an article
in Computer Technology Review -
Making
MLC Flash Practical for Enterprise SSDs.
In
July 2009 - SandForce
was ranked #2 in
StorageSearch.com's list of the
the Top 10 SSD OEMs
based on search volume in Q2 2009. This is the 1st time that the top 10 SSD
list has included a company whose primary business is designing
SSD controllers.
SandForce's
search volume was 72% higher than the #3 ranked company in this list
indicating high reader interest in what the company has to say about SSDs.
StorageSearch.com attributes this to 2
main factors.
1 - Users are getting much more interested in
educating themselves about what happens inside flash SSDs - to understand what
factors affect performance
and reliability -
and in the hope of avoiding choosing the
wrong suppliers.
2
- Thousands of designers in hundreds of companies worldwide are now
investigating the option of designing their own SSDs as the technological
barriers to doing this have crumbled way. (This is confirmed by pageviews for
SSD SOCs and reader emails.) It means that if big computer oems are successful
in the SSD market many will turn their attention to designing future SSDs
in-house rather than buying commercial off the shelf products.
Commenting
on the company's high ranking in these pages SandForce's VP of Marketing Thad
Omura said - "We are delighted StorageSearch.com is raising the
visibility of SandForce's innovative SSD Processors that enable the usage of
commodity NAND flash memory in enterprise and mobile computing applications."
In August 2009 -
SandForce announced
the availability of the SF-1000
family Evaluation 2.5" SSD featuring 34nm flash from
Micron.
In
September 2009 -
SMART Modular
Technologies announced it has selected the
SandForce
SF-1500
SSD processor for use in its next-generation enterprise-class
SATA SSDs sampling
later this year.
In October 2009 -
SandForce was again
ranked #2 in
StorageSearch.com's list of the
the Top 10 SSD OEMs
based on search volume in Q3 2009.
SandForce's dual
frenemmy nature may be a
factor in the high interest levels in this company. Even if you're not
planning to use their products - you can't afford to ignore them - because
their technology may pop up in another place close to your own interests.
Also
in October 2009 -
SandForce published a
new article - here on StorageSearch.com.
It's called - Data
Integrity Challenges in flash SSD Design. Written by Kent Smith
Senior Director, Product Marketing at SandForce - the article describes what's
needed inside the next generation of fast flash SSDs to ensure data integrity
and to eliminate the risk of "silent errors."
In November
2009 - SandForce
announced
that it has closed $21 million in Series C funding.
In December
2009 - A-DATA
announced it has joined the growing roster of
SSD makers using
SSD SoCs from
SandForce. Products
are now in the final testing stage and will be previewed at
CES next month.
1st
quarter 2010 - in this quarter
PhotoFast became
the first SSD manufacturer to market SSDs using
SandForce controllers
to end users. Previous
SandForce
inside SSDs from other companies were aimed at the server and industrial
markets.
In May 2010 -
SandForce announced
that its SSD SoC
technology had been used in a TPC-C
benchmark recently published by IBM.
The system used 10.5TB of
MLC flash SSD
capacity - implemented by 56 SSDs that use SandForce SF-1500 SSD processors.
Also
in May 2010 - SandForce officially
announced
a branding program called - SandForce
Driven SSDs.
This effectively confirms
StorageSearch.com's analysis of the
company's marketing efforts which we had described in the past year as "SandForce
inside" SSDs.
SandForce was already the best known
SSD SoC company in the
SSD market - confirmed by
its high listings in StorageSearch.com's quarterly
Top 10 SSD Lists
which have tracked the SSD search volume of millions of readers. The new
branding campaign leverages this - and the company clearly aspires to
maintain this early lead - in the same way that Intel did with it
famous
Intel inside program which was designed to obliterate the x86 microprocessor
clone makers (and x86 licensees too).
But unlike the Intel program
(which played on the fact that you did need an Intel architecture processor
chip to run Microsoft's PC operating system) - you don't need a SandForce
controller chip to make a fast SSD. That includes SSD companies like
STEC,
Pliant Technology,
Density Dynamics,
Micron,
Fusion-io (and many
other companies) who make SSDs which are faster than SandForce-driven products
but use their own proprietary IP.
And even SandForce customers
who find it convenient to fill product line gaps with SandForce driven SSDs
- don't necessarily want to reveal that to the outside world.
There are
many SSD companies I can think of who do use SandForce controllers - but
may not wish to join a branding program like this which implies that
their SSDs are the same as all the others listed. See also:- when the SSD brand
sends the wrong signal
In July 2010 - A new set of the
SSD Bookmarks
- suggested by Michael Raam,
CEO SandForce
was published on StorageSearch.com.
In
August 2010 - SandForce announced
what their technology can do for
Slim
SATA SSDs. One of the advantages of
skinny flash SSDs
is the SSD controller
fits into a smaller physical space - because it doesn't need external
RAM chips.
In
September 2010 - SandForce
announced
it
has closed $25 million in Series D funding. - Michael Raam,
president and CEO of SandForce said - "This new funding will help us bring
our next-generation products to market, expand our customer and partner support
infrastructure, and accelerate our core technology development that will extend
our market leadership." See also:-
Michael Raam's
SSD Bookmarks, SSD
Controllers / IP, VCs
in storage
In October 2010 -
SandForce
announced
availability of its next generation
SF-2000
family SSD processors - for oems designing
SAS 3 class (6Gbps)
enterprise
acceleration SSDs. The SF-2000 supports 500MB/s sequential R/W, 60,000
sustained random IOPS, wire speed encryption, end to end
data integrity checks
and industrial temperature operation in a
skinny flash
SSD architecture. Also new in this controller generation is support for
sector sizes additional to 512-bytes e.g., 520, 524, 528, 4K, etc., with Data
Integrity Field (DIF) for true enterprise-class SAS drive behavior and
performance.
In December 2010 - I accidentally discovered a
well structured profile of
SandForce on Wikipedia. That profile page is new to me - but probably has
been around for a while.
In January 2011 - an article
published
in Electronic Design revealed more about the thinking behind
SandForce's SSD controllers.
Among other things it confirmed they
do
compression and dedupe as some of the tactics to manage
flash endurance.
In
February 2011 - SandForce
said it had shipped more than one million of its
SF-1500 and SF-1200 SSD
Processors since they were released into production in 2010.
SandForce
Driven SSD Manufacturers shipped more than 100 Petabytes of NAND flash into
the mainstream computing markets.
In May 2011 -
SandForce named
DriveSavers (a
data recovery company)
as a member of its trusted partners program.
In June 2011 -
SandForce
announced
that a single SSD using its SF-2000 SSD Processor
along with 25nm MLC flash memory has achieved the highest possible WEI score
of 7.9 for the disk data transfer rate in a Windows 7 environment (3.5GHz AMD
CPU with 8GB 1.3GHz RAM). The company also announced that
Kingston Technology
has joined the
SandForce
Driven SSDs group - bringing the membership upto 30 companies.
In
August 2011 - SandForce
announced
that it has shipped over 2 million
SSD processors in the
past 18 months - and the company also demonstrated its controller
compatibility with 24nm MLC flash made by
Toshiba.
In
October 2011 -
LSI
announced
a definitive agreement to acquire
SandForce for
approximately $322 million. The transaction is expected to close early in the
first quarter of 2012. SandForce president and CEO, Michael Raam will
become General Manager of LSI's newly formed Flash Components Division.
In
November 2011 - SandForce
was nominated for the
2011
Global Semiconductor Alliance Awards - in the category "most respected
private semiconductor company."
In January 2012 -
LSI
announced
it has completed the acquisition of
SandForce. |
| . |
| Surviving SSD
sudden power loss |
Why should you care
what happens in an SSD when the power goes down?
This important design
feature - which barely rates a mention in most SSD datasheets and press releases
- has a strong impact on
SSD data integrity
and operational
reliability.
This article will help you understand why some
SSDs which (work perfectly well in one type of application) might fail in
others... even when the changes in the operational environment appear to be
negligible. |
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| " SandForce's
shipments growth in 2010 surprised analysts because it grew so much faster
than anyone had wildly predicted..." |
| ...Editor:- from -
the Top SSD Companies. | | |
| . |
| Who's who in SSD? |
Editor:- November 30, 2011 - SandForce is
1 of 29 companies in the SSD
controllers and IP list, a frequent high flier in the
top 20 SSD oems list
and the company has also had many honorable mentions in past editions of the
fastest SSDs.
What
did the SSD market look like in 2006 when SandForce was born?
In my
history of
the SSD market - I said that 2006 was the year SSD awareness flared into
the notebook
user market. Samsung
had already declared SSDs to be a strategic market the year before.
At
the start of 2006 there were only 36 companies actively marketing SSDs -
of all types - including rackmounts - but by the end of the year that had
grown to 44.
Memory prices had dropped to the point where SSDs
would be attractive to new markets. And in
2007 - the
year of SSD architecture revolutions - flash SSDs proved they could beat the
performance of hard drives and start to challenge
RAM SSDs when they were
deployed in arrays - once again pushing the boundaries of what SSDs could do and
redefining who could afford them.
It was clear to SSD market experts
that the SSD market could grow to 100, 150 or more companies within a short
time. (That's why I started
the top 10 SSD companies list in 2007.) In such a market - where would the
expertise come from to deliver the state of the art performance that could be
packed into 2.5" SSDs?
Only a handful of US
military SSD companies
like STEC and
BiTMICRO (and their
counterparts doing similar things for universities and technical incubators in
China) had the expertise.
Most of the new companies coming into the
SSD market would be faced with the problem that they didn't have the technical
expertise to develop competitive SSDs and if they did invest the design effort -
the market was still too small to guarantee they could make any money out it
sustainably after paying for all the R&D and all the marketing costs too.
That's
the gap which SandForce filled when they came to market in
April 2009.
Alex Naqvi - who cofounded the company told me at the time of
their launch that SandForce had started out from the perspective of looking
at the silicon.
What could they do with it? How could they design
storage drives which would be faster than anything else, but also more reliable
and cheaper to make?
The company used a variety of state of the art
architectural techniques which have since been well documented.
Looking
back on what SandForce has disclosed about its technology in recent years I
know that many of these specific techniques had been used before by other
companies.
For example
RAIC technology for memory
chips by Solid Data
Systems in the 1990s. And
wear leveling was
first used by M-Systems.
And using compression to create flash buffer space - was a technique used inside
the Managed Flash Technology from
EasyCo which came to
the SSD market in 2007. Also
skinny RAM cache
flash architecture was integral to the design of the SiliconDrive family
(now part of WD)
which came to market in 2004.
But it was the combination of all these
technical factors and great management and ambitious marketing (documented in
my article - Imprinting
the brain of the SSD ) which made the difference from - Who cares?
to
- You care! - about the about the identity of SSD controllers.
SandForce
has become one of the best known of all SSD brands - and not just the best
known brand of controllers.
How much is that worth?
Well -
LSI - thought it was
worth over $300 million when they agreed to acquire SandForce in October. So
that tells you.
For related articles about SandForce here on the mouse
site - take a look at the
SSD Bookmarks
- suggested by SandForce and
SandForce
- editor mentions on StorageSearch.com.
I currently talk to more
than 300 makers of SSDs and another 100 or so companies which are
closely enmeshed around the SSD ecosphere - which are all profiled here on
the mouse site.
I learn about new SSD companies every day, including
many in stealth mode. If you're interested in the growing
big picture of
the SSD market canvass - StorageSearch will help you along the way. Many
SSD company CEOs read our site too - and say they value our thought leading SSD
content - even when we say something that's not always comfortable to hear. I
hope you'll find it it useful too. | | |
| . |
| LSI buys its way into the
top 5 SSD companies list |
Editor:- October 26, 2011 - LSI today
announced
a definitive agreement to acquire SandForce for
approximately $322 million in cash and to take up approximately $48 million of
unvested stock options and restricted shares held by SandForce employees.
The
transaction is expected to close early in the first quarter of
2012.
SandForce
president and CEO, Michael Raam
will become General Manager of LSI's newly formed Flash Components Division.
Editor's
comments:- in June 2011- a reader asked me - how much is
SandForce worth?
I said - "...in the current state of the SSD
market I would estimate that Sandforce is worth significantly more than
SanDisk paid for
Pliant ($327
million) but slightly less than if someone were to acquire
STEC."
And
I posted my reply here on StorageSearch.com
Since then Sandforce has
dropped slightly in its ranking in the
top SSD companies and
the competitive situation it faces has got tougher - with more viable
competitors operating in its market space (for customers of its oem customers -
which will dampen its growth rate). Those factors in the last 3-4 months have
depressed its value somewhat - and so it seems that LSI is offering a
realistic price. The deal announced today adds up to about $370 million.
Although
it's too early to make definitive statements about how this will impact the
market. Some things are clear.
- LSI has bought itself a place in the
top 5 SSD companies list
- significantly up from where it has previously been languishing - closer to
the bottom end of the top 20.
- Uncertainty about what happens next in the
PCIe SSD space - which
had been a significant gap in SandForce's interface map - will benefit systems
competitors like Fusion-io,
and TMS and
controller makers like Marvell.
OCZ - which has used
SandForce controllers within its PCIe SSD products - has been growing the speed
of its own controller IP (Indilinx) and and
recently acquired additional PCIe human design resources from
PLX Technology which means
that it could easily uncouple itself from depending on SandForce controllers
if the new owner LSI ever turns into an SSD competitor. That's my threat
analysis. But OCZ has reacted positively to this news.
Ryan
Petersen, OCZ's CEO - congratulated SandForce and
said - "SandForce
has been a great partner, and we expect the added resources of LSI will only
benefit SandForces customers. Moreover, because OCZ and SandForce previously
contemplated this scenario, we expect that this combination will have no
material impact to our existing product lines or business."
- the first SSD product which LSI had codesigned with
Seagate - already had a
Sandforce controller in it - something which proud Seagate had been reluctant
to reveal until it became obvious.
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