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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
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- editor's comments:- March 2010 - STEC (
2009 revenue $354 million) offers SSDs in more form factors than any other
company. Only
Foremay,
RunCore and
BiTMICRO come close
to this breadth of products.
STEC's core strategic markets are in the
military and high performance enterprise server markets.
You can see
dozens of competitors for STEC's
military SSDs here
and even more competitors for STEC's enterprise customers who integrate its SSDs
into rackmount arrays
here.
STEC has been featured in StorageSearch.com's
Top 10 SSD Companies
List - for all 11 consecutive quarters. You can see my commentary (both
positive and negative) in those articles.
Here are some recent milestones extracted from
SSD Market
History.
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.
In July 2009 -
STEC announced it had
received
$120
million order for its ZeusIOPS SSDs from a single enterprise storage
customer for delivery in the 2nd 1/2 of 2009. This followed an earlier
announcement that the company has partnered with a leading defense systems
contractor to supply its
MACH8 industrial SSDs
for integration into a platform designed on behalf of the U.S. Military as part
of a 12 month,
$28
million supply contract.
...Later:- in November 2009
- we discovered that the big customer behind the $120 million order was
EMC
- who would be carrying inventory through to 2010.
In August
2009 -
STEC
said
it will ship 6Gb/s SAS
flash SSDs in both 2.5"
and 3.5" form
factors in Q4. STEC's new ZeusIOPS SSDs will deliver 80,000 IOPS random read,
40,000 IOPS random write with transfer speeds of 550MB/s read and 300MB/s write.
STEC also said it's
sampling
a faster version of its 3.5"
FC compatible SSDs. STEC
also announced a new policy of offering
MLC flash
in so called "enterprise class SSDs".
Also in August
2009 - an article in the Shanghai based 21st Century Business Herald
(Chinese language)
discussed
STEC's share price and competitive environment, quoting many
SSD analysts,
including the editor of StorageSearch.com.
In
October 2009 - STEC
was ranked #3 - in the 10th quarterly edition of the
Top 10 SSD companies.
In
November 2009 - a legal company called Brower Piven said it was
considering a class action
lawsuit against STEC
regarding what it called "misleading statement(s) to investors"
(earlier this year) regarding the state of design wins and oem potential
business related to STEC's ZeusIOPS.
My own view related to
investments in SSD companies
is that because it's such a fast changing and
confusing
market where there is no overwhelming enduring market advantage attached to any
single supplier at the present time - you'd be nuts to regard any such
investment as a long term prospect. (Where in this context "long term"
is 5 minutes after the next press release from another SSD maker.)
Although
many companies are establishing reputations within the market, and such
reputations are material factors for buyers who choose between different types
of products - those are project dependent pragmatic decisions. There is no
clear relationship between these factors and stock price.
In February
2010 - STEC
reported that its
revenue
for full-year 2009 grew 55% to $354 million.
In March
2010 - STEC
started sampling a new family of
SlimSATA and SATA-CF
32GB/64GB flash SSDs for use in embedded markets. Performance is 15,000
/ 6,000
R/W IOPS
and R/W transfer rates are up to 135MB/s and 130MB/s respectively. See more
about this below. |
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| STEC
samples slim SSDs with deep roots |
Editor:- March 2, 2010 -STEC has started
sampling a new family of
SlimSATA and SATA-CF
32GB/64GB flash SSDs for use in embedded markets.
Performance is
15,000 / 6,000 R/W
IOPS and R/W transfer rates are up to 135MB/s and 130MB/s respectively.
"Increasing demand for high performance and
high
reliability SSDs within the embedded markets is a trend we are beginning to
see and on which we have put ourselves in a position to capitalize," said
Manouch Moshayedi, Chairman and CEO of STEC. "The introduction of our new
lines of small form factor SSDs for embedded applications is in line with our
strategy to help proliferate the use of SSDs across a broad range of
applications."
Editor's comments:- in a way this is STEC
going back to its roots.
In the server market - where it is better publicly known - STEC is
dependent on the success of partners like
EMC whose secret
ingredient in the SSD cola experience is bottling the water.
STEC
is also vulnerable to being substituted out for other
2.5" SSDs (or
sideswiped by PCIe SSDs)
at any time.
But STEC knows how to market to designers in embedded
markets. These are currently much smaller than the other segments in the classic
SSD market
penetration model. Nevertheless it's a way of boosting revenue.
And
here's something else to think about... which links together the oldest
segments in the flash
SSD market with the newest one for
SSD backup - which is still
at the birth stage.
The important feature in these new products is
the ratio of sleep mode power to operating mode power - which is 10
to 1. That's not too far off the ideal ratio (100 to 1) I think
it needs to reach in the next 5 years to support the concept of putting
petabytes of SSD
archive storage into 2U
racks. More about
that later... |
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In the meantime experience
gained in the unsexy (but
reliability
obsessed) embedded SSD
modules market can be viewed as a long term investment in what will be
the biggest market for SSD shipments long after the
current SSD market
bubble bursts. | | | | |
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the Problem with
Write IOPS - in flash SSDs |
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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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| There
are
hundreds
of articles about SSDs 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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