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Introducing the SSD Bookmarks Series - Zsolt Kerekes, editor

The SSD market has - a long history stretching back 35 years - and according to many SSD analysts - a bright future too. It's a complicated and often confusing market which offers users and vendors hope and excitement too. Something refreshingly different in the cynical staid computer market.	.....
Why is the SSD market so different?
For users - SSDs offer unique value propositions which empower them to do things which were impossible or uneconomic to do before. For vendors - SSDs offer huge new markets and opportunities to advance computer architecture in a rich variety of revolutionary ways on a scale not seen since the market debut of the microprocessor in the early 1970s.

Unfortunately the topic of SSDs on the web is clouded by misunderstanding and misinformation.

Some of this is due to ignorance by editors who don't understand the subject. Some is due to FUD pronouncements from vendors. But adding to this swirl of contradictory content are genuinely held differences of opinion by SSD experts who hold diverging views about the alternative paths for the future of SSD technology. In such cases of contradictory SSD expert opinions (as with the old RISC versus CISC debates, or Open versus Proprietary operating systems) there are no absolute rights or wrongs. Those past choices in the IT market involved different sets of opportunities and risks. Today you have to be aware that there are indeed choices to be made in SSDs too. There's no monopoly of good ideas. And sometimes an SSD technology which is right for one application - may be inadvisable for use in another.

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As editor of StorageSearch.com I've been an evangelist for the SSD market during the past decade.

But frankly I don't have enough time to read what other storage publications are saying about SSDs. That's partly a bad habit - acquired from the time when there were no other publications covering the whole storage market, and partly due to time pressure (many good article ideas here never get to see the light of day), and (here's a confession) because I used to get so irritated when I saw misleading articles about SSDs in otherwise reputable publications. That was another reason to stop looking.

But in recent discussions with SSD vendors and readers it became clear that in addition to a lot of rubbish and nonsense being published elsewhere on the web about SSDs, there was also a lot of good stuff too!

Increasing the depth and quality of education and awareness about SSDs in the general market is important to everyone in this industry. It's good for users (helps them avoid making bad mistakes). It's good for vendors (helps them sell more products faster). And it's good for publishers too.

The SSD market has gotten too big and complex for it to be comprehensively chronicled in any singe place. Despite that I'm a bit of a control freak when it comes to organizing data online - and I wanted to do something useful about flagging good SSD signposts while there was still time to make a difference.

I pondered on how to pull together a directory of reliable SSD articles in a way that produced better results than any single editor, web 2.0 app or search-engine could do. (They all have inbuilt weaknesses, agendas or biases when it comes to choosing articles.)

You don't need to understand semiconductor physics to buy a new processor or a server - but at this particular generation in the evolution of the SSD market we're in today - you do have to be aware of a heck of a lot of technology and architectural concepts if you want to successfully leverage SSD technology in large scale deployments. Eventually that will change. But it could take another 3 years.

That's when I had a Eureka moment. The answer was simple. I was already in contact with most vendors in the industry - why couldn't we collaborate in a way which preserves the unique competitive spirit of each vendor - but also collectively gives back something new to the SSD community?

So in April 2009 I contacted SSD visionaries and thought leaders at the pinnacle of the SSD market and asked for their inputs to this new series.

Although these people are incredibly busy, they mostly agreed it was a good idea and, as many of them are readers of StorageSearch.com themselves, they know that our readers value high quality reliable information about the SSD market.

Over the next 2 years these suggestions will open up fresh views which cut across the wormhole fabric in the alternate big bang universe of solid state storage.

I'm aiming to get SSD Bookmark suggestions from as many companies as possible. All companies in the SSD industry have been invited by email and web announcements. Some of the companies which are coming later in the series are currently in stealth mode and haven't officially announced any SSD products yet. Others, as you can already see, have been in the market for a very long time.

I hope that as the content in the series expands you'll find it interesting and a useful resource which gets you thinking in a different way about the SSD market.

The format for each set of bookmarks includes:-

one article which best describes what the company is doing in the SSD market - written by or about their own company.

two or more web links to SSD resources which are not just about the contributor's own company.

and in each case - a short note saying why they recommend it to our readers.

Thanks for reading this. Enough from me. I hope you enjoy the links.

And if you are one of those people I've been talking to about your own contributions - just please stop managing your organization for the next 30 minutes and get on with it. It's not that painful - and our readers (myself included) are eagerly waiting to hear from you.

the SSD Bookmarks

BiTMICRO - SSD Bookmarks
...................................................................................................................................
suggested by Rey Bruce - CEO

Dataram - SSD Bookmarks
...................................................................................................................................
suggested by Jason Caulkins - Chief Technologist

Dolphin Interconnect Solutions - SSD Bookmarks
...................................................................................................................................
suggested by Tim Miller - CEO

Foremay - SSD Bookmarks
...................................................................................................................................
suggested by Jack H Winters, CTO

Intel - SSD Bookmarks
...................................................................................................................................
suggested by Kevin T Crow - Strategy Specialist, NAND Solutions Group

ioSafe - SSD Bookmarks
...................................................................................................................................
suggested by Robb Moore - CEO

Pliant Technology - SSD Bookmarks
...................................................................................................................................
suggested by Greg Goelz - VP of Marketing

SandForce - SSD Bookmarks
...................................................................................................................................
suggested by Michael Raam, CEO

Solid Access Technologies - SSD Bookmarks
...................................................................................................................................
suggested by Tomas Havrda - President

STEC - SSD Bookmarks
...................................................................................................................................
suggested by Scott Stetzer, VP Marketing

Texas Memory Systems - SSD Bookmarks
...................................................................................................................................
suggested by Woody Hutsell - President

WD Solid State Storage - SSD Bookmarks
...................................................................................................................................
suggested by Gary Drossel - VP of Product Planning

WhipTail Technologies - SSD Bookmarks
...................................................................................................................................
suggested by James Candelaria - CTO

StorageSearch talks to SSD leaders...

Fusion-io's CEO - re MLC in banks.

Over 80% of the SSDs that Fusion-io has sold in the last couple of years have been MLC rather than SLC - and David Flynn thinks that they probably have a bigger base of enterprise MLC SSDs which has been operating longer in customer sites (upto 3 years) than any other company. ...read the article

the editor enjoys another conversation with SSD movers and shakers

Violin's CEO - re Oracle acceleration market.

I asked about how Violin's business was doing - and in particular were they seeing any drop-off in RAM SSDs? Don Basile said - on the contrary that their RAM based appliance business was growing - and overall their SSD business was growing faster than anything he had seen in previous companies. In the enterprise SSD acceleration market they said they thought the next few years would see a lot of winners. ...read the article

Nimbus's CEO - re the design of its NAS SSDs.

The 1st question I asked was about the storage blades. I had already guessed (and he confirmed) the interface was SAS. But the surprise came when I asked whose SSDs was he using? Thomas Isakovich said Nimbus makes its own SSDs ... ...read the article

Texas Memory Systems - re MLC and RAM SSDs.

Jamon Bowen said current consumer grade MLC nand flash has endurance on the order of 3,000 write cycles. ... And the company's burn-in process (done for QA as part of manufacturing) would use up 10% of the endurance life before the SSD even reached the customer!

In many bank applications RAM SSDs are actually cheaper than flash - because of the small size of the data. ...read the article

1.0" SSDs	1.8" SSDs	2.5" SSDs	3.5" SSDs	rackmount SSDs	PCIe SSDs	SATA SSDs
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