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SSD software

SSD Software news
Stec's profiler removes guesswork in sizing SSD caches

Editor:- May 21, 2013 - Stec today announced that it's offering a free profiling tool - EnhanceIO Profiler - which can enable users to determine how much benefit they would get from using its EnhanceIO (SSD caching software) - before they even install any SSDs.

The company says that the "non-disruptive installation" can save hours of administrative trial and error by recommending the optimal block size, and the capacity and type of SSDs to be used for maximum performance gain.


Whatever you can dream - you can build in software - says Fusion-io's CTO

Editor:- May 9, 2013 - Fusion-io will pick up the pace of innovation and do more of the "I" in "IT" - and align more of its technology developments towards marketable customer needs - according to the company's CTO, Pankaj Mehra - who also said today in the same webcast - "Whatever you can dream - you can build in software."

His development aim is to enable FIO's customers to pick up weak customer demands in real-time and be able do something useful about these leading indicators in seconds rather than after 85 hours of offline analytics processing (which loses the original business opportunity).


OCZ gets award for Windows compatible SQL flash cache

Editor:- May 8, 2013 - OCZ today announced that its ZD-XL SQL Accelerator earned the Best of Interop award in the data center and storage category.

ZD-XL (unveiled at CeBIT last February) is a bundled package for Windows servers which includes an SQL optimized flash caching software appliance which leverages the low latency of an associated OCZ PCIe SSD card.

The judging committee, comprised of 16 IT editors and analysts who reviewed nearly 150 entries. See also:- SSD ASAPs, PCIe SSDs


Do you have impure thoughts about deduping SSDs?

Editor:- March 28, 2013 - What comes to your mind when you think about SSDs and dedupe?

A theoretical ratio? - x2, x5, x10...

Or maybe you groan? - It's too messy to manage and even if capacity gets better, something else gets worse - so let's just forget the idea...

A new blog - Introducing the SSD Dedupe Ticker - by Pure Storage looks at the state of customer reaility in this aspect of SSD array technology and comments on the variations you can get according to the type of app and the way of doing the dedupe.

Among other things the article also looks at the biggie question - of performance impact - answering the author's rhetorical question - "why hasn't deduplication taken the primary storage world by storm like it has the backup world?" ...read the article


Nimbus brings flash SMART plus stats to SSD rackmounts

Editor:- March 25, 2013 - Nimbus Data Systems today announced new software APIs which support its proprietary HALO OS based family of rackmount SSDs - and report on hundreds of real-time and historical metrics such as:- flash endurance, capacity utilization, latency, power consumption, deduplication rates, and overall system health. Another new feature is that sys admins can monitor their Nimbus SSD arrays via new apps on Android / Apple phones and tablets.

Thomas Isakovich, CEO and founder of Nimbus Data said the new software framework would enable cloud architects and enterprise customers to gain greater insight into their flash storage by viewing internal aspects of their flash storage which mattered to them - rather than simply relying on benchmark indicators which have been cherry picked by vendors or reviewers


Fusion-io acquires SCSI target IP team

Editor:- March 18, 2013 - Fusion-io announced today that it has acquired another storage software company - ID7 - which had been collaborating on the development of FIO's ION data accelerator software.

ID7 was the primary developer of the SCST (SCSI target subsystem for Linux) that enables replication, thin provisioning, deduplication, high availability, and automatic backup on any Linux server or appliance.

"We had an opportunity to work with Fusion-io on the development of the ION Data Accelerator..." said Mark Klarzynski, Founder and CTO of ID7 (who blogged today about the acquisition).. "We're excited to join the Fusion-io team... to work together on open, software defined solutions to today's most challenging data demands."


OCZ releases VXL 1.3

Editor:- March 5, 2013 - OCZ today announced the general availability of VXL 1.3 (SSD software) - which enables PCIe SSD flash volumes (on the company's Z-Drive R4) to be virtualized and synchronously mirrored.

Another new feature - related to enterprise caching - is a 'business-rule' pre-warming cache engine that adapts the flash cache to the activity cycles in the data center to determine peak I/O performance needs at certain times.


another $24 million funding for ZFS SSD ASAP ISV Nexenta

Editor:- February 27, 2013 - Nexenta Systems today announced it has secured $24 million in Series D financing.

The company's SSD ASAP software - called NexentaStor - currently supports SSDs from the following companies:- DDRdrive, HGST, InnoDisk , Intel, LSI, OCZ, SanDisk, Seagate, SMART and STEC - according to Nexenta's hardware support list (pdf).


Virident betas remote PCIe SSD sharing

Editor:- February 21, 2013 - Virident Systems recently announced beta availability of a new software suite - called FlashMAX Connect - which enables low latency shared server-side storage and high availability when used with the company's range of PCIe SSDs.

New functionality includes:-
  • fast / low-latency synchronous mirroring that replicates writes from one server to another, providing storage node or server failover without affecting application and data availability.
  • shared storage management in remote PCIe SSDs. This allows customers to share the storage residing on remote servers and thereby scale PCIe flash capacity independent of compute. For example - a single PCIe flash card can service multiple servers.
  • Easily managed controllability of cache policies within installed PCIe SSDs:- write-back, write-through and write-around cache so that users can choose cache modes which provide better fit to their performance and infrastructure needs.
Editor's comments:- it's long been known within the SSD industry that these features have been in the pipeline - because they're based on support at the PCIe switch chip level.

For an overview of this architecture enabling chip level support and how it offers flexibility in servers and SSDs - take a look at this video - PCIe in enterprise SSD designs by PLX.


Software - a new reason to reconsider Intel's server SSDs

Editor:- February 13, 2013 - Intel yesterday announced that in the next 30 days it will ship a Linux version of the SSD caching software - based on IP from its acquisition of NEVEX last August. The products have been rebranded as Intel® CAS (Cache Acceleration Software).

Editor's comments:- I would categorize Intel's current generation of enterprise SSD solutions (which includes the same old indifferent SSDs working with the new CAS software) as being in the medium to fast-enough performance range.

Suitable customers might be end users who have never used SSD acceleration before - or users with apps which don't need the higher speeds offered by competing SSD bundled drive / module packages from Fusion-io, SanDisk and OCZ - and customers who don't want to do their caching via dedicated rackmount based products from the dozens of other vendors listed in the SSD ASAPs directory.

The market segment addressed by these new Intel products is the early majority of enterprise SSD adopters - who will be reassured by the perceived safety of buying into the dangerous world of solid state storage acceleration from a value based brand.

I spoke about the new CAS software to Intel product manager Andrew Flint who cofounded NEVEX and I learned some useful things about the product.

The first question I asked was - how many PCIe SSDs can the CAS product support in a single server? And were there any graphs showing how performance drops off or is maintained when you do that.

The answer was - this info isn't publicly available right now. Although it may be in the future.

That's when I concluded that Intel CAS (married to current generation Intel SSDs) isn't a fast product - and is not in the kind of performance league where a user would seriously worry about this type of scalability problem.

Intel's ideal end-user customers right now for CAS are people who have been using no SSD acceleration at all coupled with hard drive arrays. That performance silo could change - with faster Intel SSDs in the future - and isn't due to limiting characteristics in the software.

I asked - Does it support 3rd party SSDs?

I was told - the standard release only supports Intel SSDs. But there's nothing in principle to prevent it being used with other SSDs using the open source release of the software.

The product is a read cache. I was told that it makes very good use of whatever RAM is in the server to optimize both read and write performance. However, my view is that as Intel SSDs aren't fast - this is somewhat academic.

I asked about the time constants which are analyzed by the caching software - and learned that - depending on the app - the data usage period which is analyzed goes up to days. (Generally in this type of product longer is better - and when you go up from milli-seconds and seconds to minutes, hours and days - you have the potential to get better caching results.)

I learned that Intel CAS isn't written around the data structure or interface - and is hardware agnostic. Users can tell the software which apps they want to cache - via a control panel. This is very useful in environments where a single server is running a mix of apps - some of which are critical (in performance needs) while others are not.

I asked - does the CAS have to have advance knowledge of the app? - Is it optimized for a preset list of apps?

I was told - No. It will work just as well for - what I called - dark matter software- which might be a proprietary app which no one else knew about.

I asked if Intel collects stats from the general population of installed servers which use the software? - in order to improve tuning algorithms...

I was told - No. The optimizations (data eviction probability rates) are done based on what is learned on the customer's own server and private data - and the factory shipped software. There isn't a wider intelligence learning or gathering or snooping function.

I learned that a special feature of this Intel CAS release is the ability to share cache resources with a remote SSD. The data stays hot and doesn't have to be recreated when different virtual machines are accessing this type of resource.

Overall I came away with a good impression of the CAS software and how well the NEVEX technology idea has been assimilated into Intel's SSD business.

It will undoubtedly help Intel sell more SSDs to people who have never used enterprise SSDs before - and maybe also to people with low end apps who have used SSD acceleration before but whose first choice of SSDs wouldn't otherwise have been Intel.


aligning database block sizes with SSDs

Editor:- February 5, 2013 - I was only saying to someone yesterday that I've had emails from readers who are designing software for SSDs who - having researched the subject of flash etc - then spent too much time over-worrying about internal SSD hardware details that they really shouldn't be worrying about - because by the time they learn about it - that type of hardware issue is ancient history.

By a curious coincidence today I came across a recent blog by Chas. Dye at Pure Storage called Please DON'T Fiddle with Your Database Block Size! - which also warns about this very issue.

Chas says - "At Pure Storage, we believe that a factor that should never influence the block size decision is your storage subsystem."

Editor's comments:- I'd certainly agree that trying to slavishly make your data structures look like something you've read about which might be inside an SSD controller is probably a waste of time - because unless you know the SSD designer you don't really know what's going on - and the abstraction you read about in some web site is only a small part of the picture. If an SSD is so sensitive to the data you hit it with - it's not the SSD you should have bought in the first place.


Proximal Data - case study

Editor:- January 28, 2013 - Proximal Data today announced details of a new case study (pdf) re the use of its SSD ASAP software (AutoCache ) to trim 30 hours off the monthly SAS analytics report for a financial customer which used to take 36.5 hours.

Editor:- when SSD software companies start talking about real customers - the acquisition press releases follow not long behind based on recent SSD history.


Violin acquires GridIron

Editor:- January 21, 2013 - Violin today announced it has acquired GridIron Systems.

Editor's comments:- in October 2012 I listed GridIron as 1 of the 3 main contenders to Fusion-io in the enterprise SSD software stakes -with the qualifying comment...

"GridIron - probably has the most sophisticated SSD ASAP software in the industry. But it's a shame it has been tied (until recently) to their hardware - an SSD HDD hybrid box."

Today's announcement - which adds to the growing list of notable SSD acquisitions in the modern era of the SSD market - will enable Violin to strengthen its already established authority in the enterprise SSD rack market.


Virident's PCIe SSDs VMware Ready

Editor:- January 14, 2013 - Virident Systems today announced that its FlashMAX II family (PCIe SSDs) has achieved VMware Ready status.


Samsung acquires an SSD software company

Editor:- December 15, 2012 - Samsung has acquired an SSD software company - NVELO which operates in the SSD ASAPs (caching) market.


IOPS / $ as a goodness metric for enterprise SSDs is bad

Editor:- December 5, 2012 - The cost of SSDs is one of the arguments most often cited by antis to explain why (in their view) the transition to a pure SSD storage market can't happen.

I guess the designers of the first ships made from iron (which unlike wood doesn't float) and the first airplanes (which were heavier than air) must've got used to hearing similar objections. ...more in SSD news


Enmotus demos its SSD ASAP technology

Editor:- November 27, 2012 - Enmotus is demonstrating its auto-tiering software - which it calls automated MicroTiering technology (pdf) - for the first time in public this week at the Server Design Summit.


in memory database is even better with FIO's flash SSDs

Editor:- November 19, 2012 - McObject today announced that it has run benchmarks of its (intrinsically designed for) in-memory database systems software - with transaction logging enabled - on a number of different devices - and in particular Fusion-io's ioDrive SSDs.

Editor's comments:- In a paper published 3 years ago - In-Memory Database Systems: Myths & Facts - McObject said that fast flash SSDs used as the storage hot spot for traditional database software could never get performance as good as their own in-memory solution running in DRAM with legacy hard drive array bulk storage - and various remarks in that paper sent out a strong anti-SSD message which the company is in effect correcting today.

What McObject is now saying - is that by using a fast low latency SSD for the "performance draining" transaction log - you can get even greater speedups. There are other benefits too - which arise from the efficiency of their small footprint database - which means that a software product - which was originally designed for the DRAM-HDD world - is a good fit in the flash SSD world too - if you have the right scale of data and the right SSD.

...Later:- McObject's Marketing Director Ted Kenney emailed me to clarify a couple of points about their product and my interpretation of their business thinking. Here's some of what he said.

I would point out one thing about your blog post, just to clarify from McObject's point of view.

You mention the Myths & Facts white paper, specifically where we argue (Myth 3, I believe) that an IMDS will always be faster than an on-disk DBMS that uses an SSD to store records.

Keep in mind that that paper's comparison does not touch on transaction logging. At least, transaction logging is not mentioned; the assumption (our assumption, in writing it) is that the comparison is between a "pure" IMDS (all data kept in main memory and nothing stored to persistent media), and an on-disk DBMS that stores records on a SSD. Our conclusion was that while the DBMS storing to SSD is likely faster than a DBMS storing to HDD, it still can't touch the performance of a pure IMDS.

In contrast, our recent comparison (the subject of the press release I sent you) is focused differently: it presumes that the user wants data durability and recoverability. That rules out use of the pure IMDS (because RAM storage is volatile), so we instead look at solutions that deliver recoverability/durability, specifically an on-disk DBMS storing records to persistent media vs. an IMDS with transaction logging (let's call that IMDS+TL). Then for the IMDS+TL we measure performance using different storage devices: HDD, SSD and ioDrive.

The result: an IMDS+TL storing its log on HDD beats the performance of a DBMS storing records to HDD (by about 3x). If you then "upgrade" the device on which the IMDS+TL stores its transaction log, the performance difference (compared to DBMS+HDD) is even greater (as much as 15x when using the ioDrive). But – the recent round of testing did not look at the "pure" IMDS performance. If it had, the pure IMDS would have beat the IMDS+TL using any of the devices to store its transaction log.

We hadn't considered that our message in the earlier white paper was "anti-SSD" or that we were now correcting that message. Instead, we'd say that the earlier paper looked at a scenario in whichperformance is the highest goal (the only goal mentioned, anyway) whereas the new tests focused on performance, with durability/recoverability as an additional requirement.

Re your comment - "It seems that a software product – which was originally designed for the DRAM-HDD world – is a good fit in the flash SSD world, too – if you have the right scale of data and the right SSD." - Actually eXtremeDB was designed for the DRAM world initially (in-memory only). When we later added support for persistent storage (first with transaction logging, later with optional persistent storage for selected record types) we were (and still are) agnostic: eXtremeDB does not recognize or care about the type of persistent media used.

Again – thanks for taking the time to look at our news and at our various statements vis-à-vis flash, storage and performance. It sounds like you understand our technology and the issues involved. I just wanted to point out that the white paper's discussion, and this recent press release, take slight different perspectives on what the developer/end-user is trying to accomplish.


OCZ's new VXL software release includes fault tolerant support for arrays of PCIe SSDs

Editor:- October 23, 2012 - OCZ today released a new version (1.2 ) of its VXL cache and virtualization software - which provides high availability, synchonous replication and enhanced VM performance across arrays of the company's Z-Drive R4 PCIe SSDs.

The company says this assures that host-based flash is treated as a continuously available storage resource across virtualized clusters and yields no data loss and no VM downtime even during complete server failures.

"By combining the power of storage virtualization and PCIe flash caching, and by working centrally with the hypervisor rather than with each local VM, we have developed a solution that takes full advantage of flash without losing any of the benefits associated with virtualization," said Dr. Allon Cohen, VP of Software and Solutions, OCZ. "VXL's ability to transparently distribute flash resources across virtualized environments provides IT professionals with a simple to implement solution..."


Skyera says a little more about its SSD software

Editor:- October 16, 2012 - Skyera today revealed a few more features of the software which supports its recently launched rackmount SSDs - along with an overview and some pretty pictures. Among other things - which were new to me - administrators can allocate LUNs according to 3 different classes of SLA for capacity and performance.

"A true solid-stage storage solution must be more than simply sticking flash media and controllers in a box" said Skyera's founder and CEO Rado Danilak.

Editor's comments:- as I said in the enterprise SSD survivor's guide - "Software used to be SSD's enemy. Now it can be SSD's best friend."

See also:- SSD design efficiency


in the SSD software golf challenge who's got a similar handicap to Fusion-io?

Editor:- October 2, 2012 - last week I was asked by a reader (who didn't want to be named here) if I could suggest any companies which have SSD software as powerful and far reaching as that of Fusion-io.

I thought it would be much too simplistic to answer with a list of names taken out of context - so instead I said there are several different levels at which you can view and analyze this:-
  • down in the flash
  • above the flash array
  • communicating intelligence between the API and raw flash level
  • working between different storage systems and software components (caching, tiering, virtualization, data protection etc)
  • working in different markets - enterprise and consumer.

    Why consumer? - you ask - I thought we were talking about Fusion-io?

    As I mentioned a few years ago Fusion-io's software is applicable to notebooks. It's simply a commercial decision not to pursue that avenue in the current unprofitable state of the consumer market. But in the long term it's one of the reasons that the company is rated as being so valuable - because its technology can span solid state storage from the level of Ultrabooks (with PCIe inside) upto supercomputers.
After using a lot more words in my email than I've used here - the end result was a reply to my reader with a list of companies which you wouldn't be too surprised to see if you looked at the list of top enterprise SSD companies and correlated that with who's acquired or developed their own software. The list ran something like this:-
  • FlashSoft (acquired by SanDisk) - have the makings of a serious industry platform.
  • GridIron - probably has the most sophisticated SSD ASAP software in the industry. (In my email I said - shame it's tied to their hardware - an SSD HDD hybrid box. But this week - that has changed. See the notes below for more about this.)
  • SANRAD (acquired by OCZ) is also a contender.
Interacting between the hardware layers to optimize the system within enterprise racks and arrays - the ability to hop in with intelligence gained from another level to tweak performance and reliability - is a genuine efficiency asset.
  • Virident - have several layers of intelligence in their PCIe SSD software. They don't like to talk too much about the details. But it's one of the things which makes their offering stronger than many others.
  • Nimbus - started out using a standard SSD controller in their 2.5" SAS arrays - but have added some firmware level access points which they leverage from higher levels to manage fault tolerance and performance.
  • Skyera - is probably the hottest example of this. They dive in at many levels to increase efficiency of the way they use flash.
And in the consumer software space I suggested:-
  • EasyCo - the very first enterprise SSD software company which was bumped aside by the SandForce inside technology wave - has found a new market opening selling their endurance and performance enhancing software to makers of cheap flash storage for phones and consumer devices. It's no longer world beating IP - but it has its uses. (And maybe attractive for future patent trolls.)
The only real surprise in the list above to regular readers - might be GridIron - which because they haven't been a true pure SSD company (their main product is hybrid SSD and HDD boxes) don't get so many mentions on these SSD pages.

Anyway - I was reminded about the above email exchange when I saw GridIron's press release in my email this morning regarding their TurboCharger GT-1500 Data Accelerator Appliance - a 2U 12TB SSD ASAP - which can accelerate upto 120TB of back end storage.

In one way this can be regarded as an extrapolation of Dataram's XcelaSAN - which was launched 3 years ago. But the difference is in the detail and sophistication of the hotspot algorithms - which GridIron describe as "multi-zone behavior profiling (pdf)"

GridIron have a new (to me) marketing tagline - "Tier 0 Performance at Tier 2 Pricing" - I don't like SSD tiers myself - I prefer the idea of enterprise SSD application silos. But GridIron's summary of what they do is better than most.

Going back to the original question at the start of today's posting.

Do I know any vendors whose SSD software can match or beat Fusion-io?

Overall - the answer is - No. But in many important areas the answer is - Yes.

In my ramblings today (remember this started out as a much longer rambling email) you can see that the SSD software market is alive, healthy and just as competitive as the flash hardware business. Apologies to all the other companies I could have named but left out. You'll get your turn later.


AMD will rebrand Dataram's RAMDisk software

Editor:- September 6, 2012 - Dataram today announced it will develop a version of its RAMDisk software which will be rebranded by AMD in Q4 under the name of Radeon RAMDisk and will target Windows market gaming enthusiasts seeking (upto 5x) faster performance when used with enough memory.


STEC mini-survey suggests that 60% of serious VM users already use SSDs

Editor:- August 28, 2012 - A survey of visitors attending the first day of VMworld - and conducted on behalf of STEC - suggested that over 60% of attendees already had SSDs in their datacenters but also that less than 50% of their business-critical applications are currently supported by SSDs.


FlashMAX is FlashSoft compatible

Editor:- August 27, 2012 - Virident's PCIe SSDs are supported by SanDisk's FlashSoft auto-caching software - it was announced today.

The companies say this collaboration includes sales, joint testing and validation programs, and support and services assistance.

Editor's comments:- the thinking behind SanDisk's strategic decision to support competing SSD hardware with its software was one of the things which I learned in a recent interview with the company (see SSD news August 15 below for more details).


Proximal Data acclaimed at Flash Memory Summit

Editor:- August 24, 2012 - at the recent Flash Memory Summit - Proximal Data was acclaimed joint Best of Show award winner in the category of most innovative flash memory technology for its AutoCache VMware accelerating (SSD ASAP software). Proximal Data also announced that it supports LSI's Nytro WarpDrive (PCIe SSDs).


is SanDisk really nurturing true enterprise SSD DNA?

Editor:- August 15, 2012 - Do you remember FlashSoft?

Many of you still do. It was one of the top enterprise SSD software companies before it got acquired 6 months ago by SanDisk.

One of the tips in the Survivor's Guide to Enterprise SSDs - is that when it comes to SSDs - rules are made to be broken.

And earlier this week I learned this can apply to my own gut feel rules of thumb too. The unwritten rule being that semiconductor companies generally make a mess of enterprise software and are not so hot at understanding the enterprise SSD market either.

Frankly I had expected that FlashSoft would disappear into SanDisk - and would get smothered by a marketing organization which had many times before demonstrated its lack of awareness of the fundamentals of good enterprise SSD marketing. And that was the tone of my parting message to the founders along with a few words of congratulations as they disappeared into the new SNDK afterlife. I never expected to hear from them again.

So the first thing I asked Rich Petersen - (former VP of Marketing at FlashSoft and now Director, Marketing Management at SanDisk) a few days ago was - how are they doing as part of a chip company? What are they doing with the FlashSoft brand? How do they plan to develop the enterprise SSD business? etc.

One of the things that Rich had wanted to talk about was the release of new support in their caching software for VMware vSphere. We spent a lot of time talking about that too - and had a big discussion about the role of SSD software - not only as a business tool - but in effect as a new way of virtualizing and looking at enterprise SSDs and how they can fit into architecture models. (My view is that a powerful SSD suite - if it becomes widely used - can be as significant to the SSD market - as a new interface or form factor.)

We covered enough ground to write several long articles. I'm not going to do that today - because I'm supposed to be on vacation and sitting out in the garden by my pool.

So you should regard this as the really really short version - and a placeholder for much more detail which I will return to later.

FlashSoft - or the enterprise SSD software part of SanDisk (or whatever else you may want to call it) is today operating in a business mode which is like what you would expect from a best of breed enterprise SSD systems company. They talk to end users like they've always done. They learn to change important aspects of how the products work and are sold because of feedback from end users - and not because they've read that something is a good idea in a market analyst's report.

There are some surprising consequences of this at the technical and business level.

Chief among those surprises for me is that FlashSoft says it will still support other brands of SSDs. Rich explained this was just a pragmatic business decision. Big users told them they like FlashSoft - but they already use or might want to use non-SanDisk SSDs. These users are only going to standardize on one SSD software platform. They don't want to learn 2 different ways of doing the same thing.

On the other hand an advantage of having access to an enterprise SSD maker is that if a big user needs some expensive hardware on which to evaluate the benefits of their software - then it's easier on the marketing budget to get some SanDisk SSDs to do this.

FlashSoft's visibility into what enterprise end users really do - and the suprising preferences they have - which are driven by customer business optimizations rather than simplistic technical extrapolations - also means that - like rackmount SSD companies - FlashSoft learns valuable market lessons which can be reapplied to optimize designs in future SanDisk enterprise silicon.


Violin plugs some software gaps with Symantec

Editor:- August 13, 2012 - Violin Memory today announced its rackmount SSDs can now support snapshots, cloning, dedupe, replication and thin provisioning - based on software IP from Symantec.


Fusion-io does a few new things

Editor:- August 2, 2012 - the performance and strategic importance of SSD software was reinforced in 2 recent announcements by Fusion-io.

Yesterday - FIO launched its new ION software - which is a toolkit for bulding your own network compatible SSD rack by adding some Fusion-io SSD cards and their new software to any leading server.

The concept isn't entirely new - because oems have been doing this with various different brands of PCIe SSDs for years and this is a well established alternative market segment for PCIe SSDs. What is new - is that it makes the whole thing much easier.

Fusion-io says this new software product "delivers breakthrough performance over Fibre Channel, InfiniBand and iSCSI using standard protocols." (1 million random IOPs (4kB), 6GB/s throughput and 60 microseconds latency in a 1U rack.)

Earlier this week FIO announced it was collaborating on getting interoperability in server-side flash and caching software with NetApp. It's easier now to write a list of major storage systems oems who aren't doing something significant with FIO.

Going back to SSD software...

In the 1990s Sun Microsystems created and leveraged the phrase - the Network is the Computer.

I have long thought an apt reinterpretation of that in this decade is "the SSD is the computer" - or maybe the "SSD software is the computer" - because the ultimate characteristics of fast computers are determined more by the SSD architecture which is installed - than by the same old CPU chips.


Software, rehab, enterprise SSDs and bug spray

Editor:- July 30, 2012 - "Software used to be SSD's enemy. Now it can be SSD's best friend." - is one of several key ideas discussed in my new home page blog today - the Survivor Guide to Enterprise SSDs.


AutoCache for PCIe SSDs

Editor:- July 23, 2012 - Proximal Data announced immediate availability of its first product - a software based SSD ASAP - designed to work with PCIe SSDs - in particular - products from LSI and Micron.

AutoCache ($999 for cache sizes less than 500GB) reduces bottlenecks in virtualized servers to increase VM density, efficiency and performance. The company says it can increase VM density upto 3x with absolutely no impact on IT operations.

Editor's comments:- here are some questions I asked about the new product - and the answers I got from Rich Pappas, Proximal's VP of sales and business development.

Editor:- How long does it take for the algorithms to reach peak efficiency?

Pappas:- It varies by workload, but typically it takes about 15 minutes for the cache to warm to reach peak efficiency.

Editor:- Is the caching only on reads, or is it effective on writes too?

Pappas:- AutoCache will only cache reads, but by virtue of relieving the backend datastore from read traffic, we have actually seen overall write performance improvements as well. This effect is also dependent on the workload.


Amazon offers explicit SSD performance in the cloud

Editor:- July 19, 2012 - There are many ways SSDs can be used inside classic cloud storage services infrastructure:- to keep things running smoothly (even out IOPS), reduce running costs etc.

Amazon Web Services recently launched a new high(er) IOPS instance type for developers who explicitly want to access SSD like performance.

In 3 to 5 years time all enterprise storage infastucture will be solid state - but due to economic necessities it will still be segmented into different types by speed and function - as I described in my SSD silos article - even when it's all solid state.

I predict that when that happens - AWS's marketers may choose to describe its lowest speed storage as "HDD like" - even when it's SSD - in order to convey to customers what it's about. It takes a long time for people to let go of old ideas. Remember Virtual Tape Libraries?


Software is key to SSD innovation - says blog from Virident

Editor:- June 29, 2012 - Dedupe and fibre-channel are some of the innovations discussed in a new blog by Jeff Sosa, Director of Product Management, Virident Systems who poses the question - is flash storage an incremental or a radical innovation?

Sosa's article goes on to say - "The 'radical' innovation in the host-attached flash storage marketplace today comes from products that not only access flash through a PCIe connection, but also bypass storage protocols to drive new levels of performance and enable new functionality not previously imagined." ...read the article


Skyera claims 100x gain in system level SSD endurance

Editor:- June 19, 2012 - In a new positioning video launched today - Skyera's founder Rado Danilak claims that his company's vertically integrated technology - which includes both new SSD controller and supporting SSD software - achieves effectively a 100x gain in endurance using new consumer grade flash. The result will be SSD bulk storage systems which cost less than hard drive arrays. ...see the video


Nutanix announces a new NFS for PCIe SSD accelerated CPUs

Editor:- June 12, 2012 - Nutanix today Nutanix announced the general availability of NDFS (Nutanix Distributed File System), a bold new distributed filesystem that has been optimized to leverage localized low latency PCIe SSDs such as those from Fusion-io.

By shifting the NFS datapath away from the network directly onto the VMware vSphere host, NDFS bypasses network communications that have historically been fraught with multiple high-latency hops between top-of-rack and end-of-row switches.

Nutanix accelerates both read and writes for any workload. Redundancy and availability are achieved by data mirroring across high-speed 10GbE switches.

Editor's comments:- Nutanix is in the SSD ASAP market - with CPU-SSD equivalency architecture integrated in the OS. The company says their architecture "collapses compute and storage into a single tier." You can get the general idea from their blog and video.


STEC releases SSD cache software for any make of SSD

Editor:- June 6, 2012 - STEC today announced the general availability of the company's EnhanceIO SSD Cache Software for Linux and Windows environments with pricing starting from $295 and $495 (per server) for a 1 year subscription.

STEC says its SSD cache software can used with any vendor's SAS, Fibre Channel, PCIe or SATA SSD.

In addition, a Linux version of EnhanceIO SSD Cache Software, based on Facebook's Flashcache caching module, will be made available under a general public license (GPLv2).

"As one of the original architects of Flashcache, I'm extremely pleased to see this technology being enhanced and supported by STEC in their EnhanceIO software," said Mohan Srinivasan, software engineer at Facebook. "Flashcache has proven to be an invaluable tool for accelerating application performance at Facebook."

Users can choose from a selection of caching schemes and block sizes to suit their preference and SSD's capabilities. STEC stores the metadata for the cache in system DRAM rather than in the SSD. The DRAM required for the cache is 0.1% of the cache size so a terabyte of SSD cache requires about 1GB of DRAM support. Product support tools include a profiler which can collect user data and suggest the best policy option parameters for the cache setup.

Editor's comments:- irrespective of the technical strengths and weaknesses (and pricing model) of the this new product compared to other competing SSD ASAP / caching offerings - one question which immediately springs to mind is this.

How serious is STEC about making this software work as a standalone product? And if it becomes successful will the company be tempted to bundle it free with its own SSDs?


NEVEX offers free trial of $5K value Linux caching software

Editor:- May 29, 2012 - NEVEX says it's offering the 1st 30 people who trial its SSD ASAP / caching software for Linux - the option to keep the production version free.

I spoke a few minutes ago to Nigel Miller, VP Business Development, NEVEX - to test if his phone number is correct - because that's the response mechanism.

I asked how much can some one save by taking up the offer?

He said the regular price will be $5,000 per cached terabyte.

I also said it was unusual in the web industry to have nothing on their web site about this - and he said they wanted a quick and easy way to talk to people. He also said that if you are one of the early responders you will get good access to their technical support people. As time is of the essence here's the number if you're interested:- +1 647-393-2200


welcome to the new alchemy - converting SSD software to gold

Editor:- May 29, 2012 - a new blog today on StorageSearch.com asks - where are we now with SSD software?

For over 30 years the SSD market operated in a software near vacuum. Why did it take so long for the systems software industry to do anything useful with SSDs?

And why are seemingly insignificant little SSD software companies today being gobbled up at prices which seem to have no connection to what they could ever earn from license sales? ...click to read the new article


60 seconds to make your SSDs accelerate even faster

Editor:- May 8, 2012 - VeloBit today released 1.1 of its SSD caching software for Linux called HyperCache. (VMware and Windows versions are in Beta.

Editor's comments:- I spoke to VeloBit's CEO, Duncan McCallum about the company and the new product.

Like many other SSD ASAP software packages HyperCache ducks the problem of how to manage high availability environments by effectively only caching host reads and bypassing the caching SSD when doing host writes.

Duncan said the software is efficient in its use of host resources. It takes up less than 3% of host server CPU cycles and about 2% of RAM (compared to the capacity of the attached SSD cache).

How is VeloBit's caching software different?

In use - the company says its content locality caching uses the signatures of the data patterns which already are used frequently and have lots of references in order to predict and prioritize the caching of similar looking data. In that respect - the cache manager is learning something which is unique to that apps environment rather than simply caching blocks based on where they are address-wise relative to the current hot data.

In its business model - Duncan said he wanted to make VeloBit's software easy to adopt and install via web marketing. A design goal was to make HyperCache capable of being installed in under 10 minutes. He said the new launch version typically installs in under 60 seconds!

VeloBit has tested their software with SSDs in various form factors from leading companies including OCZ, Fusion-io and Virident.

Duncan commented that when it came to PCIe SSDs - they found their software produced the best results with Virident - which he said produced the fastest SSD caching results of any SSD they had yet tested.

Other aspects of VeloBit's offering (to me) look similar to many other previous SSD software products:- internal compression, write attenuation, real-time dedupe and pricing on a per CPU basis.

With so many companies vying for the same customer share of mind the thing which stands out for me is the 60 seconds install time. Even allowing for a degree of future software bloat - the slowest part about acquiring new SSD ASAP software could soon become typing in your credit card details.


Permabit launches SSD dedupe software

Editor:- April 25, 2012 - -Permabit today launched a low latency dedupe engine (pdf) which has been optimized for flash SSDs and which is scalable to millions of dedupe operations per second.

The product is aimed at SSD appliance makers.


RamSan + SANsymphony = SSD ASAP

Editor:- April 18, 2012 - Texas Memory Systems today announced an auto-acceleration / SSD ASAP marketing bundle with DataCore Software.

"Companies are looking for solutions that make SSD benefits available across the entire IT infrastructure..." said Dan Scheel, President of Texas Memory Systems. "Rather than go with a rip-and-replace upgrade to get these benefits, the TMS/DataCore bundle will provide better utilisation of existing storage infrastructure while dramatically improving it."


SCSI for PCIe SSDs

Editor:- April 3, 2012 - The SCSI Trade Association today announced that it has accepted SCSI Express as a formal project and has taken ownership of refining, defining and marketing this data storage industry standard initiative.

SCSI Express is an industry initiative designed to adapt storage to PCIe. It uses the SCSI over PCIe (SOP) and PCIe architecture queuing interface (PQI) model being defined within the T10 Technical Committee.

Editor's comments:- the PCIe SSD market is already an estalished and permanent part of the enterprise SSD future landscape. What SCSI Express will do is provide an easy way to leverage software stacks which have been already developed for SAS SSDs and iSCSI SSDs but taking advantage of the lower latencies and faster throughput of PCIe. It's all about SSD software.

The best way to think about "SCSI Express" is "SCSI for PCIe SSDs". It's the first SCSI standard to be driven by the agenda of SSDs rather than hard disks.

See also:- What is SCSI?, storage ORGS


NVSL paper discusses kernel adaptations to unfetter fast SSDs

Editor:- March 8, 2012 - a recent white paper - Providing Safe, User Space Access to Fast SSDs (pdf) - published by academics at NVSL (Non Volatile Systems Lab) at UCSD - discusses techniques for reducing kernel associated overheads in the filesystem by an order of magnitude without removing security and file permissions.

The authors say - "Our intent is that this new architecture be the default mechanism for file access rather than a specialized interface for highperformance applications. To make it feasible for all applications running on a system to use the interface, Moneta-D supports a large number of virtual channels. This decision has forced us to minimize the cost of virtualization."


SanDisk acquires FlashSoft

Editor:- February 15, 2012 - SanDisk today announced it has acquired FlashSoft - one of the leading independent software vendors in the SSD ASAPs market.

SanDisk intends to sell FlashSoft's products as standalone software, as well as offer these software products in combination with SanDisk's growing portfolio of SAS, PCIe and SATA enterprise solutions.


NEVEX CacheWorks supports RamSan flash

Editor:- February 8, 2012 - NEVEX today announced that its CacheWorks for Windows Server has been tested and optimized for performance with the new generation of flash SSDs from Texas Memory Systems - in particular the RamSan-70 (a PCIe SSD) and the RamSan-810 (a 1U rackmount SSD).

Editor's comments:- In 2010 I wrote about the sometimes confusing brand stretch of "RamSan" - as even back then 70% of the SSDs that TMS sold were flash rather RAM - and PCIe was a sizable chunk of the product line mix too.

This software support from NEVEX fills a key functional gap (SSD ASAP) in the TMS route to market.

It's important for NEVEX too.

TMS has been selling enterprise SSDs longer than any other company. But unlike some competing PCIe SSD companies (Fusion-io, OCZ, STEC and Micron) which have all acquired their own SSD software IP in the past year (thereby obsoleting most 3rd party caching/tiering development investments) - Texas Memory Systems is still focused on hardware design. Nevertheless - while I'm confident that acquiring an ISV isn't on TMS's wish list - the company itself recently announced it would look positively on a suitable potential acquirer. So nothing is as certain as it seems.


Micron acquires Virtensys

Editor:- January 20, 2012 - Micron today announced it has acquired the assets of UK based Virtensys which marketed rackmount SSDs stuffed with Micron's PCIe SSDs and supported by a patented multi-server sharing virtualization interface.

Editor's comments:- if buying an SSD software company was a good idea for leading PCIe SSD makers Fusion-io and OCZ - then Micron has to follow suit or get out of the game.

Chipmakers generally dislike buying "systems" software companies - because they don't understand systems and risk alienating their oem customers. But Micron's reputation won't be dented if they can't leverage the Virtensys software. Everyone knows how hard it is to get real value out of a software acquisition. And in the next few weeks more people will take another look at Micron's Micron's SSD pages. So it's paid for itself already.


OCZ acquires SANRAD

Editor:- January 10, 2012 - OCZ yesterday announced it has acquired SANRAD for $15 million.

"SANRAD's software is a wonderful complement to OCZ's Flash technology," said Oded Ilan, CEO of SANRAD Inc. "We are excited with the opportunity created by this unique combination between storage virtualization, caching and PCIe Flash storage."

Editor's comments:- this makes the 4th SSD IP or company acquisition that OCZ has done that I've written about on these pages. 3 out of the 4 have aimed squarely at the enterprise SSD market.

SSD software will be a powerful sales and business growth accelerator for PCIe SSD companies in 2012 - as it will open up new market opportunities much faster than previously possible with human engineering assets. Put simply - it's let the software solve the problem of integrating the SSD. It's more than simply auto-tiering - but that's an important enabling tool as well.

SANRAD was also the 1st company to ship front loadable PCIe SSD modules BTW.


the New Business Case for SSD ASAPs

Editor:- December 6, 2011 - StorageSearch.com today published a new article - the New Business Case for SSD ASAPs .

What's an SSD ASAP? - When I use this term it includes:-
  • auto-tiering SSD appliances
  • SSD cache - the automatic kind
  • SSD acceleration As Soon As Possible
  • Auto-tuning SSD Accelerated Pools of storage
  • combinations of the above
It's going to be a huge market. SSD ASAPs are 1 of the 6 main SSD product types that will be around in the pure solid state storage datacenter of the future in the 2016 to 2020 timeframe.

The word "new" in the title is deliberate. It replaces an article I wrote about SSD ASAPs when the market started in 2009.

Since then - my thinking - and that of key players in the market has developed. This should no longer just be regarded as a tactical market to bring the advantages of SSD acceleration to legacy hard drive arrays. ASAPs are an essential interface between different levels of SSD storage. ...read the article


analyzer suite could speed up auto-tiering SSD evaluations

Editor:- November 28, 2011 - hyperI/O today announced availability of its Disk I/O Ranger software analysis tool for Windows environments.

The company says this will help users diagnose and understand disk storage access performance problems and to to verify that QoS levels are being met at the application/file/device level. It could also simplify the evaluation of auto-tiering SSD appliances by collecting real-time metrics.


NEVEX launches SSD ASAP software for Windows Server

Editor:- October 11, 2011 - NEVEX today launched its first product - an auto-tiering / SSD ASAP software cache for Windows Server, VMware, Hyper-V priced at $2,495 per physical server (before an introductory discount of $1,000 - which now available).

CacheWorks' selective cache optimization technology empowers administrators by providing flexible control to accelerate specific data by application, file type, and location to deliver typical speedups of 3x - according to customer quotes in their launch press release (pdf).


2 Software Companies entered the top 20 SSD list in Q3

Editor:- October 3, 2011 - As Q3 fades back into SSD history - I'm busy analyzing stats and writing my comments for the new (18th quarterly) edition of the top 20 SSD companies - which will be published here next week. This analyzes the search stats of over 350,000 online readers in the past quarter who have seen SSD content from StorageSearch.com and the article includes my views of where these companies are heading in the market (whether that's up, down or nowhere).

This is the 1st time that software companies have entered the top SSD companies list. One them - IO Turbine - would have crept in towards the bottom end of this list - if it hadn't already been acquired by Fusion-io. The other one - which no one has acquired yet - did even better. Stay tuned..


SANRAD enters the SSD ASAP market

Editor:- September 20, 2011 - SANRAD has entered the auto-tiering SSD / SSD ASAPs market with the launch of its new VXL software which supports its family of FC and GbE unified storage network routers.

"Many organizations are adding flash resources to their virtual server environments but aren't able to use them efficiently," says Dr Allon Cohen, SANRAD's VP Marketing. "By combining our software with their infrastructure, they instantly have faster access, more secure data, and resilience."

Editor's comments:- the thinking behind SANRAD's acceleration architecture is described in this white paper - Where to put your flash SSD accelerators - for best enterprise results (pdf)


Fusion-io can do secure erase in less than 60 seconds

Editor:- September 15, 2011 - Fusion-io today announced that its new SureErase data sanitization tool has been confirmed as meeting Department of Defense sanitization standards by the Defense Information Systems Agency.

SureErase enables users to securely remove/erase all data on any ioMemory-based technology, following DoD/NIST standards, regardless of capacity, in less than 1 minute.

Editor's comments:- although that sounds like a long time - relative to fast purge SSDs (and it is too long for some applications) nevertheless when you take into account that many of Fusion-io's PCIe SSDs have multi-terabyte capacities - it's impressive. See also:- disk sanitizers


SDS shrinks SSD IOPS in VMware

Editor:- September 15, 2011 - the use of SSDs with VMware has popped up in these news pages in recent years more times than I care to count. But I got a new angle on this a few days ago in a discussion with Linda LaPorta, President of Superior Data Solutions .

Now you may ask - who is SDS? (the spelling is important here) and what do they know about SSDs? (It had been several years since I last heard from them too.) But you've all heard about STEC's ZeusIOPS - right? - Well SDS was selling this particular enterprise flash SSD design in 2006 - before STEC acquired it from Gnutek. An SDS platform was also one of Sun's early SSD offerings too. But SDS have switched focus from raw hardware to applications - and they are the US distributor for a product called VirtualStorm.

Linda LaPorta told me - "...Our software is changing the game in VDI. Right now IOPs is a big barrier to the acceptance of VDI because the cost to implement storage can be very high. (Windows 7 users are figuring 24-28 IOPs per VM…gets pricey if you need to provision HDAs for 10,000). We need a fast IO device to store the virtual applications. We like a fast SSD, but it only needs to be 100 to 200GB. It is a read only drive that stores the master image of each application. All the VM's go to a well cached raid system. This is where we reduce the IOPs to 2-4 /VM and we keep the capacity requirement to 3GB/per VM (which is actually making it AFFORDABLE to consider all SSD instead of HDDs)..."


Fusion-io acquires SSD ASAP software company

Editor:- August 4, 2011 - Fusion-io announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire IO Turbine for approximately $95 million.

David Flynn, Chairman and CEO of Fusion-io. "We believe integrating ioMemory and IO Turbine adds a critical and previously missing performance component to virtualized IT environments that will accelerate the adoption of Fusion-io technology. This acquisition also underscores our focus on providing customers with an enterprise solution that features software and hardware components designed to accelerate their business' full suite of applications."

Fusion-io also reported revenue of $72 million for the fiscal fourth quarter of 2011, more than 6x as much as the year ago quarter in 2010 and up 7% from from the prior quarter.

Editor's comments:- these are the first financial results reported by Fusion-io since it became a publicly listed company. The results - and the company's decision to acquire an SSD ASAP software company together confirm and validate the company's strong showing in our predictive top 10 SSD companies list in recent years. The SSD market has become a serious business - and is no longer just about how cleverly a bunch of electronics guys can tame a bunch of unruly memory chips and make them play hard drive tricks.


SSD impacts on future storage software?

Editor:- July 11, 2011 - I recently had a conversation with a very knowledgeable strategist at a leading enterprise storage software company. I won't say who the company is - but if I did - most of you would know the name.

The interesting thing for me was that he'd recognized that if the hardware architecture of the datacenter is going to change due to the widespread adoption of solid state storage - that will create new markets for traditional software companies too.

And I'm not talking here about new software which simply helps SSDs to work or interoperate with hard drives - but software which does useful things with your data - and which can take advantage of different assumptions about how quickly it can get to that data - and how much intensive manipulation it can do with it.

If you try some of these intensive R/W tricks on current storage infrastructures - even if the front end is SSD accelerated - then your systems will hang. But in 3 to 5 years time - the ability to perform random IOPS on archived data hundreds of times faster than today - will make backup and recovery faster, and enable new apps to analyze and monetize data assets in a way which goes way beyond what even Google can do today.

I find it encouraging that these conversations are now taking place.

Because the way to the future isn't just doing the same things faster. The future of SSD enabled markets will be doing things which could never be done before.

Where will you read more about those new developments? You're already in the right place.


FlashSoft launches software to unleash the power of enterprise flash

Editor:- June 28, 2011 - FlashSoft today announced it has secured $3 million Series A funding and has launched its first product - software which enables enterprise flash to be used as a cost-effective, server-tier computing resource (ASAP functionality in software) which is available for free evaluation through a 30-day "Try Before You Buy" program.

FlashSoft says that despite the performance advantages of flash SSD, 2 barriers have inhibited its adoption in the enterprise.
  • First, when used as primary data storage, flash memory cannot easily integrate with and leverage the benefits of existing storage systems infrastructure.
  • Secondly, storing all of an application's data on server-attached flash memory remains expensive.
FlashSoft's new all-software product overcomes both of these objections with what they call a "tier minus one" solution for flash virtualization. Enterprise IT can now provide databases, applications and virtual machine environments with the performance benefit of having the entire data set on flash, with only a fraction of the data actually stored in flash. This innovation makes enterprise flash a cost-effective performance solution that works seamlessly with existing storage infrastructure. In fact, FlashSoft actually reduces the IO burden on storage, producing even greater cost savings. FlashSoft's technology is designed to deliver flash-grade performance within a standalone server, across server clusters, and throughout the data center. Early Customer Successes

One early user - Zenprise said "By using FlashSoft, we aren't buying new server hardware or licensing additional server software. We're simply making our existing servers and software run at their full potential." And they were equally equally impressed by FlashSoft's reliability when they set up stress tests (read case study).

In conjunction with its funding announcement, FlashSoft announced that it is collaborating with industry leaders including VMware, Microsoft, SanDisk Enterprise Storage Solutions, Virident Systems, LSI, OCZ Technology, and systems provider AMAX. These relationships will help FlashSoft integrate its software more closely with complementary hardware and software products, and provide customers with the best solutions for their specific requirements.

Editor's comments:- FlashSoft says its software (which runs on Windows Server - Linux is in beta) works with any flash SSDs upto 1TB, and takes approx 5% CPU utilization and 100MB of core RAM. I asked

How many physical SSDs does the software support?

The number of SSDs is not limited, as long as they can be represented as a single logical volume, eg. through a RAID.

Is the 1TB limit shown on your site the limit for the setof SSDs or just for each drive?

The 1TB limit is the current logical limit for the SSD used for caching. The data set is typically 5x greater (or more) than the cache. The size restriction is an artifact of early development, and in a near-future release, there will be no restriction on the size of the SSD employed.

In the case of sudden power loss – what are the steps taken to protect the state of the cached data and update the external storage?

FlashSoft employs a method called multi-level metadata management, which stores some cache metadata in RAM, but most of it on the SSD itself (and employs a balanced tree design for optimal efficiency). There are two benefits to this design: first, it minimizes utilization of server memory. Only the hottest metadata runs in server memory. The rest is cached in SSD. Also, the application regularly creates snapshots of the metadata on the SSD, so that in the event of a server crash, the cache metadata can be re-created from the snapshots + most recent metadata almost immediately. Typical recovery is less than a second. (Keep in mind, our team's background is at Veritas, Oracle, Symantec, etc. so data recovery is a top priority for the product design.)


virtual server acceleration mistakes

Editor:- June 21. 2011 - 5 Mistakes to Avoid when trying to solve I/O Bottlenecks in Virtualized Servers is a new article by IO Turbine published on StorageSearch.com.

Needless to say most of the discussion in here revolves around the best use of SSDs. Among other things - IO Turbine says "While many enterprise-class storage providers offer automatic tiering with data migration to and from the SSD storage, these solutions typically take place well after the need for the I/O acceleration has passed." ...read the article


STEC steps closer to independently marketing enterprise SSDs

Editor:- April 19, 2011 - STEC has acquired a software company in India that virtually no one had heard of before.

"The team of skilled software engineers from KQI has significant experience in such areas as system software development and virtualization," said Manouch Moshayedi, Chairman and CEO of STEC. "As the overall trend of hardware and software convergence in the storage industry continues, it is important for us to expand our product portfolio by creating increasingly intelligent storage solutions that accelerate the adoption of solid-state drives in enterprise servers. Establishing a presence in India provides us with strategic access to a global software hub with a pool of top engineering talent to cost-effectively meet our R&D expansion plans."

Editor's comments:- in recent days the nature of search activity for STEC followed a pattern that I now associate with companies which are the subjects or objects of acquisitions.

The other company which has been spiking in search news (but not so highly) is Violin Memory - which recently was named a cool vendor by Gartner.

STEC's acquisition looks to me like a much needed first step to a declaration of independently marketing its own enterprise SSDs and thereby closing an important gap in its routes to market.


Fusion-io launches partner program

Editor:- October 18, 2010 - Fusion-io today launched a new iniative - the Fusion-io Technology Alliance Program which help to accelerate the development and market dissemination of products which leverage the company's ioMemory technology.

"Enterprises around the world are seeking simplified and consolidated solutions that reduce infrastructure and overhead," said Tyler Smith, VP of Alliances for Fusion-io. "One-stop solutions, like those provided through Fusion-io's new Technology Alliance Program, reduce strains on resources, remove risks inherent with managing several partners and reduce expenditures. Working together, we believe we can offer greater value to our customers who are looking to solve the ever increasing data-intensive nature of the contemporary enterprise."

Editor's comments:- when deployed correctly acceleration SSDs can be a business transforming resource.

In the past SSD vendors have cherry picked applications and markets to get the industry to where it is today. No single company has the expertise to recognize the opportunities which exist below the shiny surface of the usual suspects - or the resources to bring hidden market gems to life. So you can expect to see a lot more collaborations in the SSD market in the future.


NVELO launches notebook SSD ASAP

Editor:- August 17, 2010 - NVELO launched Dataplex - a software product aimed at PC oems - which provides SSD ASAP functionality inside a notebook.

Since Dataplex works with off-the-shelf storage devices, PC OEMs and consumers have complete freedom to choose any SSD and any HDD, from any vendor.

"Consumers love the idea of SSD performance, but there is still a huge (price) gap between HDDs at $0.20/GB and SSDs at $2.00/GB; as an HDD replacement, the economics simply don't work for all but a very small percentage of the market," said David Lin, VP of product management at NVELO. "With Dataplex, we are making SSD performance economically feasible for a much larger market by using the strengths of SSD and HDD technology together. And we're not talking about simply installing the OS and whatever applications can fit onto a small SSD. Dataplex learns user behavior, and intelligently caches all important data and applications in an SSD device while maintaining the full capacity of the HDD for storage."

Dataplex will begin shipping from select Tier 1 PC OEMs in 2011. NVELO is currently in discussions with leading HDD and SSD vendors to enable aftermarket sales and bundling options for Dataplex, and has begun development of an enterprise version of Dataplex for server systems.

Editor's comments:- if successful - NVELO's product will render obsolete most hybrid drives aimed at the notebook market. In the server ASAP market - it's a direct competitor to the unloved MaxIQ SSD Cache Performance Kit created by Microsoft, taken to market by Adaptec - and now owned by PMC-Sierra.


Adaptec's SSD seed corn came from Microsoft

Editor:- March 25, 2010 - in yet another simulated benchmark published today related to Adaptec's SSD ASAP caching technology - which they leverage in their MaxIQ SSD product - I learned that the underlying technology was originally developed by (surprise! surprise!) - Microsoft.

"When our datacenter team came up with some innovative ideas around using solid state devices as read caching devices, we determined it made good sense to license these advances to Adaptec because Microsoft itself doesn't sell these types of products," said David Kaefer, GM of Intellectual Property Licensing at Microsoft. "By collaborating through licensing, Adaptec customers benefit from a product that delivers impressive performance and cost savings over alternatives in the market."

Editor's comments:- the whole hard disk array acceleration market will cease to exist in a handful of years for reasons explained elsewhere. Maybe the Microsofties realized it would be better to let someone else run with it - rather than make users suffer the traditional 5 years waiting for it to work properly - by which time it would be obsolete anyway.


hyperI/O captures TRIM metrics

Editor:- March 1, 2010 - hyperI/O announced that its hIOmon software supports the collection of Microsoft "TRIM" related SSD metrics - which can be captured during normal, everyday application use and without any OS, file system, file, or application changes required.


Symantec Adds SSDs to Storage Migration Classes

Editor:- December 7, 2009 - Symantec announced an upgrade to its Storage Foundation management software which enables it to automatically discover SSDs from leading vendors and optimize data placement on SSD devices transparently.

Editor's comments:- this is a tool within the context of a complex and expensive data migration service - rather than an auto-tuning SSD acceleration tool.

You'll still need the SSD Hot Spot Engineer to tell you where to migrate those files to. As we head into 2010 - Year of the SSD Market Bubble - you're going to see the word "SSD" appearing in a lot of press releases from software vendors as a way of making their products sound sexier.
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SSD controllers
SSD Data Recovery
enterprise SSD silos
SSD enhanced backup
fast purge / erase SSDs
Strategic Transitions in SSD
this way to the Petabyte SSD
auto tiering / caching SSD news
where are we now with SSD software?
how fast can your SSD run backwards?
SSD futures and market analyst reports
flash SSD capacity - the iceberg syndrome
Enterprise SSDs - the Survive and Thrive Guide
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In October 2002 - StorageSearch.com's editor talked about the role of software versus human-ware in enterprise hot spot optimization.

"Until the storage management software you run in your orgazination is intelligent enough to learn by itself what kinds of applications you're running, and optimize the characteristics of your different types of storage devices, your ability to make the best use out of new storage technologies such as SSDs will be limited by your own technical skills and the amount of work and effort you are prepared to put into solving your own performance and resource utilization problems."
Ancient storage software management inhibits roadmap to $5 billion enterprise SSD market - StorageSearch.com's news page blog (October 2002)
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In November 2002 - Bill Gates, talking about Tablet PC's said:- "There are also a lot of peripherals that need to improve here. ...Eventually even the so-called solid state disks will come along and not only will we have the mechanical disks going down to 1.8 inch but some kind of SSD... will be part of different Tablet PCs."
...from:- SSD market history
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"In May 2003 -Imperial Technology launched the world's first SSD tuning software tool called - WhatsHot SSD - which analyzed real-time file usage on the SAN to identify hot-files to place in SSD."
...from:- SSD market history
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"In May 2004 - the SPARC Product Directory published an article - Why Sun Should Acquire an SSD Company - which argued that integrating SSDs into Sun's Solaris OS and servers would result in the fastest database servers and more than make up for speed deficiencies in its SPARC processors."
...from:- SPARC market history
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In November 2006 - Microsoft announced business availability of its new Vista operating system - loudly heralded as being the first PC market OS to include SSD-aware support and native SSD cache management.

Vista (whether for SSDs or HDDs) proved to be so good that for years after its launch millions of professional pc users upgraded back to XP.
...from:- SSD market history
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"In August 2007 - EasyCo launched its "Managed Flash Technology" software to enable enterprise grade RAID-5 arrays built from consumer grade flash SSDs. MFT boosted SSD writes while also improving endurance..."
...from:- SSD history - 2007 milestones
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"In September 2009 - Dataram launched the XcelaSAN - a fast 2U rackmount SSD ASAP (auto accelerating appliance) which automatically identified hotspots to relocate critical data. The company said the XcelaSAN would automatically learn and self optimize during the 1st few hours of operation..."
...from:- SSD history - 2009 milestones
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In November 2009 - Google opened its doors to developers who wanted to work with Chrome OS - a new operating system for tablets.

In the opening video of the Chrome OS blog we learned that the architects of the new OS were "obsessed with speed". And the new netbook OS was designed from the ground up to support only flash SSDs as the default mass storage.

Google said - there is no room in this OS for outmoded 50 year old hard disk technology.
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"The 3rd quarter of 2011 - was the first time in SSD market history that any software companies had achieved enough search volume to enter the top 20 SSD companies list."
...from:- SSD history - 2011 milestones
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"What does NVMe have to do with FlashSoft software? - One thing is changing now. Instead of just saying SATA, SAS, or PCIe, well be adding NVMe to the interfaces for which we validate our software."
FlashSoft at IDF - Rich Petersen's blog - (September 12, 2012)
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SSD ad - click for more info
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how fast can your SSD run backwards?
SSDs are complex devices and there's a lot of mysterious behavior which isn't fully revealed by benchmarks, datasheets and whitepapers.

Underlying all the important aspects of SSD behavior are asymmetries which arise from the intrinsic technologies and architecture inside the SSD.
SSD symmetries article Which symmetries are most important in an SSD? That depends on your application. ...click to read the article
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this way to the Petabyte SSD
In 2016 there will be just 7 types of SSD in the datacenter.

One of them doesn't exist yet - the bulk storage SSD.

It will replace the last remaining strongholds of hard drives in the datacenter due to its unique combination of characteristics, low running costs and operational advantages.
click to read the article -  reaching for the petabyte SSD - not as scary as you may think ... The new model of the datacenter - how we get from here to there - and the technical problems which will need to be solved - are just some of the ideas explored in this visionary article.
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SSD ad - click for more info
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SSD Data Recovery Concepts
It's hard enough understanding the design of any single SSD. And there are so many different designs in the market.

Have you ever wondered what it looks like at the other end of the SSD supply chain - when a user has a damaged SSD which contains priceless data with no usable backup?
broken barrel image - click to read this data recovery article If so - this article - written by Jeremy Brock, President, A+ Perfect Computers - who is one of a rare new breed of SSD recovery experts will give you some idea. read the article
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Storage Software - by Zsolt Kerekes, editor
The most common type of "storage software" is that which does backup or replication. But there are a lot more different types of storage software than that.

Drivers for making the hardware work with the OS are a good example. But since they nearly always come from the same IHV - there's no point in listing such products here.

Software for analyzing storage can range from simple storage bus analyzers which help developers debug driver code, and freeware which looks at bottlenecks in your database upto SAN wide heavyweight packages which help you understand and manage an enterprise storage network. And while on the subject of SANS - a few brave companies like Nimbus, Open-E and Wasabi have developed what are in effect NAS operating systems.

As WAN storage networks have become more common the concept of accelerating or deduping the communications payload has also received a lot of developer attention. A leading pioneer in the IP acceleration software market is NetEx, whereas the list of storage deduplication ISVs mentioned on these pages already runs into double digits.

Security is a big subject - which has had its own pages for many years. And the Disk Sanitizer market which started out as a software solutions market has expanded into hardware - because it takes too long to erase hundreds or thousands of discarded hard drives (or tapes) using software on a single PC.
Many Data Recovery companies offer software downloads to help you with simper recovery tasks. But when your hard drives have been charred to smoky plastic or immersed in the sludge waters of a flood - a UPS or Fedex upload is a more realistic solution.

If all of that sounds too complicated then there are plenty of independent Storage Training companies to help you do it yourself or (if you've got enough money) Storage Services companies who will take the problem of managing it all off your hands.

ISVs like to talk about "lifecycles" - because it makes it sound like they've actually thought about what will happen to their teenage hacker developed code, or your data, for more than 5 minutes. Virtualization is another word which has been fashionable in recent years. Although every piece of software that's not part of a hardware driver or OS kernel already includes many levels of assumed virtualization.

One part of the lifecycle which ISVs don't talk about so much - is that part when they are no longer in business having gone bust or been acquired. But it doesn't seem to stop new startup ISVs going to the local storage VC in the wall machines to request funding.

There are thousands of storage software related stories in our storage history archive.
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