STEC

STEC, Inc., designs, develops, manufactures and markets custom memory solutions based on Flash memory and DRAM technologies.

See also:- STEC editor mentions on STORAGEsearch.com

• editor's notes:- STEC offers SSDs in more form factors than any other company. Only BiTMICRO, MemoCom and RunCore come close to this breadth of products.
  
  In May 2008 - STEC launched its first PCIe form factor SSD.
  
  In March 2009 - STEC announced that its revenue in 2008 had grown 20% year on year to $227.4 million.
  
  In April 2009 - STEC was listed #7 in the 8th quarterly edition of the - Top 10 SSD Companies. (Its lowest ranking in 2 years.)
  
  Although STEC has been successful in getting its products designed into storage arrays by large storage oems such as EMC - STEC's partners have not added enough value or IP to their own rackmount SSD offerings.
  
  Consequently these "STEC inside" SSD systems are weak in comparison to many competing systems which are faster or cheaper (due to better leveraged SSD technology). In the view of StorageSearch.com - STEC relies too much on market pull-through by partners who are me-too or weak in the SSD space. Unless it invests more in its SSD branding - its business is vulnerable to substitution and replacement by any new SSD kid on the block with a faster SSD controller.
  
  In May 2009 - STEC confirmed rumors that its Zeus-IOPS SSDs have indeed been oemed by IBM in several popular servers and storage systems.

• PCI express SSD market.
  
  While it's not intuitively obvious that PCIe SSDs compete head to head with 2.5" SSDs - the reality is they do. The growing search volume for PCIe SSDs - which StorageSearch.com has been tracking in the past year indicates that PCIe SSDs will be the main factor which limits the size and acceptance of DAS connected small form factor SSDs in the server box.

• Outside the server box - in the rackmount SSD space - the market has moved beyond the traditional RAM versus Flash SSDs debate.
  
  The new debate here is how the market will split between the 2 main options:-
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  • proprietary flash SSDs (such as those made by Texas Memory Systems, and Violin Memory).
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  • arrays of Commercial Off The Shelf flash SSDs - such as those marketed by EMC and Sun Microsystems (who both oem STEC's SSDs). But another scope for fragmentation within the COTS space itself is the appearance of rackmount SSD arrays populated by COTS PCIe SSDs such as Dolphin and NextIO.
  
  As I have discussed in previous articles - I expect all these various architectural forms to grow and prosper - rather than for any clear winners to emerge in the near future. That's because users have widely different profiles with respect to performance needs and risk tolerance - which no single technology or vendor fits most economically.

• Inside the 2.5" SSD market itself - there are many emerging point products which can threaten STEC from a performance point of view.
  
  Instead I think the biggest 2.5" SSD threat comes from STEC's customers designing their own SSDs (if they perceive that the small form factor SSD is indeed the way they want to go). With more than 20 chip companies offering the bits and pieces needed to design SSDs - and with the option of mixing and matching acquisitions with internal and external technology it's getting easier to design your own SSD. The advantage to big server oems doing this - is that they can tailor products which meet their exact needs - and add unique features which can't be easily copied by their systems competitors. That's a much bigger threat to STEC than its customers than them buying SSDs from companies using SandForce's controller (which was mentioned in the ESF article).