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| Editor:- January 26, 2012 -
StorageSearch.com today
published a new directory focusing on
HA enterprise SSD
arrays. |
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| January 2012 - OCZ and
Micron acquire PCIe SSD software companies |
OCZ
announced it
has acquired SANRAD for
$15 million.
WhipTail
announced
it has secured a Series B funding round.
LSI
announced
it has completed the acquisition of
SandForce.
Intel
announced
an agreement to acquire the
InfiniBand related
product lines, IP and business assets of
QLogic.
RunCore announced it is
shipping a 7mm
high, Sandforce-based,
2.5" SATA 3 SSD for the high performance Ultrabook market.
IP-Maker released a
data
transfer manager core - for use in
PCIe SSDs - the 1st
design to be compliant with the NVM
Express specification.
Micron
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.
OCZ demonstrated new
PCIe SSDs - which use
SSD controllers
jointly developed with Marvell
(instead of - as in previous models - controllers from
SandForce).
Samsung entered the
fast purge SSD market
- which currently numbers about 25 companies. The company says that models of
its PM810 2.5" SATA SSD family with its Crypto Erase technology deletes
targeted data in a couple of seconds regardless of the overall volume of data or
the capacity of the SSD. These models have been validated for compliance to
NIST
FIPS 140-2
pureSilicon
launched a 1.6TB
usable
(2TB raw) 2.5" SATA eMLC SSD. The Nitro
N2 has average latency under 100 micro-seconds, R/W speeds upto 540/520 MB/s
and upto 130k random
IOPS. The N2
uses a proprietary design and is protected against
sudden power
loss.
Fusion-io
exceeded 1 billion IOPS (64 byte data packets) in a configuration
which used 8 HP servers each configured with 8x
ioDrive2 Duo PCIe
SSD - in a historic
demo
this month showing the capabilities of its latency reducing Auto Commit
Memory (ACM) extension.
Huawei Symantec
published an
SPC
Benchmark report (66 pages pdf) for its high availability FC SAN rackmount
SSD - the
Oceanspace
Dorado2100. A 1 terabyte (approx) usable protected (mirrored) SSD system
(2.4TB raw) delivered over 100K SPC-1 IOPS at a market price of $0.90/SPC-1
IOPS.
Nimbus
announced
its entry into the
high availability
enterprise SSD market with the uveiling of the company's -
E-Class systems -
which are 2U rackmount SSDs with 10TB
eMLC per U of
usable capacity and no single point of failure. Interface support includes
unified 10GbE,
FC, and
Infiniband. Pricing
starts at $150K approx for a 10TB dual configuration system. |
| December 2011 - Apple
acquires Anobit |
Apple acquired Anobit for a sum thought
to be in the range $400 to $500 million.
SandForce announced
that it is sampling a new design of SSD controller for enterprise markets - the
SF-2481 - which will enable oems designing
small
architecture SSDs to adjust the amount of flash used in over-provisioning.
XtremIO secured a 2nd
round of funding in December 2011 - from various source including
Lightspeed Venture Partners -
bringing its total funding upto $25 million.
OCZ reported
preliminary
revenue for the past quarter (ended November 30) to be in the range $100
and $105 million - an increase of approximately 90% compared to the
year ago quarter and a 30% increase compared to the immediately preceding
quarter. The company attributed much of this to its growing traction in the
enterprise SSD market.
Texas Memory
Systems announced
imminent availability of the
RamSan-720
- a 4 port (FC/IB) 1U
rackmount SSD
which provides 10TB of usable 2D (FPGA implemented)
RAID protected and hot
swappable - SLC
capacity with 100/25 microseconds R/W latency (with all protections in
place) delivering 400K IOPS (4KB), 5GB/s throughput - with no single point of
failure (at $20K/TB approx list). And the company also announced that it was
looking for a potential acquirer.
new SSD articles
on StorageSearch.com this month
include:-
|
| November
2011 - RunCore is one of the fastest growing tech companies in China |
SandForce has been
nominated for the
2011
Global Semiconductor Alliance Awards - in the category "most respected
private semiconductor company."
OCZ started sampling
dual port 6Gbps
SAS SSDs in a smaller
form factor - the
Talos
2 SAS SSD provides upto 70,000 4K
IOPS
(75R/25W) and upto 1TB capacity in
2.5" (previously
only available from OCZ in 3.5"
size).
STEC
started sampling a new
high endurance
MLC SSD - based on its proprietary
CellCare technology
- the new ZeusIOPS
XE (Extreme Endurance) is a 6Gbps SAS SSD family, available in
1.8",
2.5" and
3.5" sizes (300GB
or 600GB) and supports at least 30 full capacity writes per day, every day,
for 5 years. Latency is 50 microseconds max. Sustained R/W throughput is upto
500MB/s and 275MB/s respectively and random IOPS is upto 38,000 8K (70R/30W).
NexGen emerged
from stealth mode and
announced
general availability of its first product - the
n5 - a 3U
iSCSI
auto-tiering and
real-time compression appliance - which internally leverages 48GB
RAM cache,
1.3TB PCIe SSD and
32TB raw SAS
HDD capacity to deliver
120TB RAID protected
usable fast virtual storage with adjustable performance QoS for every volume.
BiTMICRO
announced
that it has designed a new generation of enterprise
SSD controllers which
will deliver upto 400,000 IOPS performance, support upto 5TB capacity and will
be available in SSDs with SAS,
SATA,
Fibre Channel, and
PCIe interfaces in the
first half of 2012.
BiTMICRO's new ASIC based platform architecture consists of a multi-core SSD
controller integrated with multiple high-speed serial on-chip buses and embedded
processors
Fusion-io
announced
that it will ship 10TB versions of its
ioDrive Octal
(so-called because it includes 8 memory modules on double-wide
PCIe cards) in the
next quarter - which deliver 1.3 million IOPS with 6.7 GB/s bandwidth.
Coraid
announced
that it has closed a $50 million investment round - bringing its total funding
to over $85 million.
Virident Systems
announced
it has completed a $21 million Series C funding bringing its total equity
funding to $50 million. The company also launched its first
MLC based
PCIe SSD - the
FlashMAX MLC -
with 1.4TB
RAID protected (7+1)
capacity and 1.4 Million IOPS with 20 microseconds latency. (1TB MSRP
$13,000)
RunCore
announced it
has been ranked #14 in the new Deloitte
Technology Fast 50 China Program of 2011 - which ranks companies based on
revenue growth over the past 3 years. The top 5 companies achieved an average
revenue growth of 77x this year while other winning companies posted an
average revenue growth of 11x (1,186%).
OCZ launched 2 new models in
their full height PCIe SSD range - aimed at the Windows consumer market - the
RevoDrive
3 Max IOPS (120GB to 480GB costs $549-$1,399) and
RevoDrive
3 X2 Max (240GB to 960GB costs $849-$2,499) with 4KB random write
performance of up to 245,000
IOPS, and
R/W rates upto 1,900MB/s and 1,725MBs/ respectively.
new SSD articles
on StorageSearch.com this month
include:-
|
| October 2011 - LSI buys
its way into the top 5 SSD companies list |
SolidFire has
raised
$25 million in its 2nd funding round, bringing its total funding to $37
million.
NEVEX
launched its first product - an
auto-tiering / SSD ASAP
software cache for Windows Server, VMware, Hyper-V priced at $2,495 per
physical server.
Kove's
RAM SSD - the
XPD2 was 12x faster than the
previous fastest system - in the Market Snapshot
benchmark audited by STAC.
LSI
announced
a definitive agreement to acquire
SandForce for
approximately $370 million. The transaction is expected to close early in the
first quarter of 2012. SandForce president and CEO, Michael Raam will
become General Manager of LSI's newly formed Flash Components Division.
Samsung and
Micron launched an new
industry initiative - the Hybrid
Memory Cube Consortium - which will standardize a new module
architecture for memory chips - enabling greater density, faster bandwidth and
lower power.
StorageSearch.com
published the 18th quarterly edition of the
top SSD companies
list - based on search metrics in the 3rd quarter of 2011. This was the
first time that any ISVs
had entered the list (FlashSoft
and IO Turbine).
OCZ agreed to acquire
the UK Design
Team (approximately 40 engineers located in Abingdon) and certain assets
from PLX Technology which
will enable OCZ to accelerate the development of its next generation of fast
SSDs - while also reducing development costs.
Fusion-io
announced
that it will sample new faster models in its range of PCIe SSDs in November. The
ioDrive2
family (pdf) will offer R/W latency of 68 / 15 microseconds for the MLC
models and R/W IOPS of 350k / 510K IOPS (512B) for the SLC models.
Viking
announced
an extension of their non volatile module range. The
DDR3
ArxCis-NV plugs into standard
RAM sockets and provides
2GB to 8GB RAM which is backed up to SLC flash in the
event of a
power failure - while the memory power is held up by application dependent
supercap arrays.
SMART
announced
imminent sampling of a SATA
3 version of its MIL-STD-810
compliant 2.5" SSD family - which includes encryption and
fast erase. The new
Xcel-200 provides from 60GB to 240GB
SLC capacity,
500MB/s sequential R/W speeds and 60K/40K random R/W IOPS. It operates at
standard industrial
temperature ranges and is certified for operation at altitudes up to 80,000
ft.
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| ....... |
| the flash SSD story -
market survival of the fittest? |
The
emerging size of
the flash SSD market as you see it today was by no means inevitable. It owes a
lot to 3 competing storage media competitors which failed to evolve fast enough
in the Darwinian jungle of the storage market in the
past decade.
One of these 3 contenders is definitely on the road to extinction -
but could one of the other 2 still emerge to threaten flash SSDs?
A
recently published article -
SSD's past phantom
demons explores the latent market threats which hovered around the flash SSD
market in the past decade. They seemed real and solid enough at the time. |
 |
Getting a realistic
perspective of flash SSD's past demons (which seemed very threatening at the
time) may help you better judge the so-called "new" generation of nv
memory contenders - which are also discussed in the article. ...read the article | | | |
| ....... |
| Surviving SSD
sudden power loss |
Why should you care
what happens in an SSD when the power goes down?
This important design
feature - which barely rates a mention in most SSD datasheets and press releases
- has a strong impact on
SSD data integrity
and operational
reliability.
This article will help you understand why some
SSDs which (work perfectly well in one type of application) might fail in
others... even when the changes in the operational environment appear to be
negligible. |
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| Megabyte had found
a new way of funding his SSD budget. | |
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