by
Zsolt Kerekes,
editor
This is a rolling summary of SSD market highlights from the
past year.
see also:- SSD
news, SSD
history, SSD
futurology |
| April 2013 - Diablo named
SMART as flash IP partner for ultra low latency SSDs |
Diablo Technologies named
SMART Storage as
its exclusive flash partner to pioneer a new type of (faster than
PCIe SSD) memory
channel SSDs.
Fusion-io acquired
NexGen Storage (an
iSCSI
hybrid array IP
company) for $119 million.
Astute Networks launched new models in
their ViSX family of
fast-enough iSCSI
rackmount SSDs - which have upto 45TB of raw SSD storage in a 2U rack which
with
dedupe enabled
can deliver $2,000 / TB and even with dedupe switched off - comes in at about
$5,000 / TB.
Kaminario
launched its 4th generation HA SSD system - the K2 v4 - using
SAS SSDs as the
internal flash components - with 120 / 280 microsends R/W latency, 369K IOPS and
6GB/s theroughput per K block. The capacity density is 6TB usable per U at a
cost of $10K to $15K per TB.
Crocus Technology
announced it has
been awarded a contract from IARPA
to develop an 8-bit per cell memory based on its Magnetic Logic Unit
technology. |
| March 2013 -
Violin enters the PCIe SSD market |
QLogic enterered the
enterprise SSD market
- with a 2 card set PCIe SAN IOPS caching accelerator. The FabricCache has
upto 400GB flash, and 2x 8Gbps FC ports and can deliver upto 310,000
initiator IOPS and supports upto 2,048 concurrent logins.
Violin entered the
PCIe SSDs market. Its
full height Velocity cards have upto 11TB raw (8TB usable) capacity and
deliver upto 500K
IOPS.
Fusion-io
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). Fusion-io also announced it had achieved 9.6 million
IOPS (64
byte) from a single 365GB MLC
ioDrive2 (PCIe SSD).
InnoDisk
announced
it will ship industrial
SATA SSDs in Q3 using
its iSLCT technology - which repurposes MLC as emulated SLC to get 30k write
endurance
from 3k standard cells.
OCZ
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, so they are continuously available to
support HA and
FT services from within the virtualized host without the need for any
back-end SAN or storage
appliance.
RunCore announced it
has closed $10 million in Series B funding led by OFC.
Nimbus Data Systems
announced that sys admins can monitor their HALO OS based family of
rackmount SSDs
via new apps on Android / Apple phones and tablets.
Diablo Technologies
announced it has closed an additional $7.5 million of funding, increasing
the total equity investment of its most recent round to $36 million.
EMC said it was sampling
flash arrays which are designed and managed using the
big SSD
controller architecture based on leveraging IP from its
acquisition of
XtremIO. |
| February 2013 -
Virident shares data on PCIe SSDs across multiple servers |
Micron became the 19th
company to enter the
SAS SSD market.
Skyera
announced
$51 million in financing led by
Dell Ventures and including an
investment by WD.
Intel announced
imminent shipment of a Linux version of
SSD caching software
called Intel CAS (Cache Acceleration Software) - based on the IP from its
acquisition of
NEVEX in August 2012.
Virident
Systems announced beta availability of a new software suite - called
FlashMAX Connect - which enables a single PCIe flash card - made by the
company - to service multiple servers.
Silicon
Motion announced imminent sampling of a new
SSD controller - for
consumer handheld products. The SM2703 works with 1x nm TLC NAND and
enables full HD video recording for smartphones etc. |
| January 2013 -
Seagate chooses Virident for big SSD architecture |
Seagate made a strategic
equity investment in Virident as part of a
new collaboration agreement which includes remarketing Virident's
PCIe SSDs and working
together to design new SSDs
for the enterprise market.
Violin
acquired
GridIron Systems.
Imation acquired
Nexsan for $120 million.
RunCore was the 1st
external company to announce
BiTMICRO OnBoard SSD
products - the Kylin III MAX family (fast
PCIe SSDs).
Foremay shipped 2TB
industrial 2.5"
SATA SSDs with standard 9.5mm thickness.
Marvell
announced
it has made a strategic investment in
Memoright.
BiTMICRO launched a
marketing program to license its Talino SSD controller.
Toshiba began sampling a
new range of 2.5"
SAS MLC SSDs - with
self encrypting security
features and on board
sanitization. |
| . |
| December 2012 - 1/3
of Micron's nand flash trade sales wind up in SSDs |
Samsung
acquired NVELO.
WhipTail
announced
a $31 million series C funding round from a group of investors including SanDisk.
BiTMICRO began
manufacturing its
maxIO
(400K IOPS (PCIe SSDs)
which use the company's Talino
SSD controllers.
STEC
announced
that the company's interim CEO, and former CEO and founder Mark and
Manouch Moshayedi have reduced their salaries to $1 to help the
company reduce its operational costs.
Proton Digital Systems
announced
the immediate availability of its
LDPC
flash IP (a variant of
adaptive DSP
IP) for enterprise
storage applications compatible with implementation using
eASIC which
enables enterprise storage vendors to double the throughput performance at
approximately half the power that can be achieved using state-of–the art
FPGAs.
Micron
disclosed that in the past quarter SSDs had become 17% of Micron's nand
business and the company estimates that
35% of the nand flash it supplies to trade customers end up in SSDs. MLC
was about 80% to 85% of nand flash wafer production with SLC and TLC making up
the rest.
Macronix
described an experimental design of flash cells with on-chip annealing super
heaters - which the company said could be used to refresh endurance to over
100 million cycles. |
| . |
| November 2012 -
Diablo gets funding for alternative to PCIe SSDs |
OCZ
announced
its reporting is being investigated by the SEC.
Diablo Technologies
closed
a $28 million funding round to bring their
Memory Channel
Storage concept to market. This is a new high speed direct attach like
memory nand flash competitive alternative to
PCIe SSDs.
Crocus Technology
announced
imminent sampling of high speed 1.2MB MRAM SIMs and small secure MRAM
controllers - or what the company prefers to call - "Magnetic Logic
Units" - aimed at the
NFC-enabled
smartphones market.
Samsung
began
production of
64GB
eMMC SSDs which use 10nm flash geometry. Aimed at the phone and tablet
market - R/W IOPS performance is 5,000 and 2,000 respectively. R/W throughput
is 260MB/s and 50MB/s.
Micron signed an
agreement with AgigA Tech to collaborate
to develop and offer nonvolatile DIMM (NVDIMM) products using AgigA's
PowerGEM (sudden power loss
controller and holdup modules). |
| .... |
| October 2012 -
Samsung gets serious about SAS SSDs |
Samsung entered the dual
port
SAS SSD market.
Proton Digital Systems
emerged a bit more from stealth mode.
Cypress Semiconductor
acquired
Ramtron a maker of
low capacity nvm called F-RAM (ferroelectric random access memory).
Fusion-io reported 59%
year on year revenue growth for its recent quarter.
Bloomberg
reported that Violin
had already taken steps compatible with filing for a possible future
IPO.
OCZ
slimmed down its catalog and headcount - by 150 products and about 30%
respectively - as part of an effort to re-engineer business efficiencies.
Virtium outlined a new
4 part categorization scheme for matching embedded industrial temperature rated
SSDs to user cases and needs. |
| .... |
| September 2012 - 3
of the top 10 SSD companies announced new CEOs |
Virident
announced
a $26 million Series D funding round and a new CEO
Mike Gustafson
who joined the company from HDS.
Renice Technology
launched a native USB
3 SSD (no bridge chips) using its own controller IP which supports the
UAS (USB Attached SCSI)
protocol, has SMART and power interruption data integrity protection and R/W
speeds of 400MB/s and 320MB/s respectively.
RunCore
launched its
fastest yet PCIe SSD - the
Kylin III PCIe
- which has upto 1.4TB (usable) MLC capacity (full height, half length) R/W
bandwith of 3GB/s and 2GB/s respectively - and R/W IOPS upto 700K / 500K (with
4KB blocks) and 3 / 1.4 million IOPS (512B). Read latency is 65µS (512B).
OCZ
announced
the resignation of the company's founder and CEO Ryan
Petersen. Despite high revenue growth some investors said they lacked
confidence in the strategic direction and management of the company - whose
shares had spiked and then dropped again in the period leading up to this
departure - on speculation that the company might be a takeover target.
STEC
announced
that Manouch Moshayedi, had stepped down from his positions as
Chairman and CEO pending resolution of a civil complaint filed against him by
the SEC.
Dataram
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 aimed at gamers in the Windows market. |
| .... |
| August 2012 - IBM
acquires TMS, Skyera launches adaptive DSP powered enterprise SSD system |
IBM
announced it will
acquire Texas
Memory Systems.
Skyera
launched its first product - a 1U half-depth 10GbE
SSD rack with 44TB usable capacity ($131,000 approx), 3.6GB/s throughput and
upto 1 million IOPS using under 800W electrical power. Integrated software
includes inline dedupe, compression, snapshots, clones and various management
functions.
IDT
announced
it's sampling single chip NVMe
compatible flash SSD
controllers for designers in the
PCIe SSD market to
suit standard sized cards and also smaller 2.5" PCIe SSDs. Supported
features include hot pluggability, dual port access and bootability.
Fusion-io
launched
its ION software -
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.
Virident Systems
announced
it will ship a new generation of fast PCIe SSDs in September.
FlashMAX
II (pdf) has upto 2.2TB usable RAID protected MLC capacity, 103K random
R/W IOPS (4kB 70:30 mix), and 1.1 million random read IOPS (512B), and <80µS
random read latency (4kB) in a ½ length, low profile form factor.
Pure Storage
cranked up the heat on its funding to $95 million with a new
$40
million Series D funding round.
IT Brand Pulse
launched
its SSD
Brand Leader Survey Report ($3,950, 19 pages) based on datacenter surveys.
The scope ranges from controllers, drives and PCIe SSD cards through to various
types of SSD systems. |
| .... |
| July 2012 -
DensBits and Skyera enter the Top SSD Companies List |
OCZ
reported
that its SSD revenue for the recent quarter (ended May 31, 2012) grew 54%
year on year to reach $106 million.
Intel
acquired
NEVEX - (an
SSD software company
with products in the SSD
caching market.
In the 21st quarterly edition of the
Top SSD Companies
- published by StorageSearch.com -
2 new companies entered the list directly after exiting stealth mode in the
same quarter:- DensBits
and Skyera. This
edition also analyzed the competitive advantages which SSD makers gets from
using adaptive
DSP ECC IP in SSDs and leveraging
SSD software.
Proximal Data
announced
availability of its first product - a
software based
SSD ASAP - designed
to work with PCIe SSDs
- in particular - products from
LSI and
Micron.
|
| .... |
| June 2012 - Hynix
acquired DSP SSD IP company LAMD |
SK Hynix
announced
it has entered into an agreement to acquire Link_A_Media Devices
Seagate announced it
will use DensBits's
flash care technology in the design of forthcoming consumer and enterprise SSDs.
Seagate has also made an equity investment in DensBits.
LSI demonstrated
its SandForce SF-2000
flash controllers working with Toshiba 19nm and Intel 20nm NAND flash memory at
Computex 2012 in
Taipei, Taiwan.
SMART Storage Systems
announced
it's sampling yet another new variant of
SAS SSD which uses
adaptive
flash DSP technology - the
Optimus
Ultra+ is a 2.5"
SSD with 100K/60K R/W
IOPS - which
can endure
50 full random drive writes per day for a period of 5 years using commercial MLC
NAND flash technology.
SanDisk launched a new
family of bootable enterprise
PCIe SSDs with upto
400GB (MLC) capacity ($2,350 MSRP) - the
Lightning
- which leverages SSD IP from 2 previously acquired companies (Pliant for the
controller hardware and FlashSoft
for the auto caching
software).
BiTMICRO
announced
it has obtained over 600 IP assets from
QualCore whose portfolio includes
analog, digital, and mixed-signal IC design.
Kaminario
announced
it has secured a $25 million series D round of funding, bringing its total
funding to $65 million. |
| .... |
| May 2012 - SAS SSDs
advance to 12Gb/s - SSD
news |
HGST
demonstrated
the industry's first 12Gb/s
SAS SSD.
EMC
announced
it has acquired XtremIO
for $430
million.
Fusion-io demonstrated
its first ever
2.5"
SSD. It connected via SCSIe.
StorageSearch.com published a new
article analyzing the market for
2.5" PCIe SSDs
Apacer
launched a new
small (50.8 x 29.8mm)
mSATA SSD aimed at the
Ultrabook
market with upto 256GB (MLC) capacity and R/W speed upto 470/200MB/s and 50K
IOPS.
WhipTail
launched
a multi-protocol
HA SSD rack
called the INVICTA ($250,000
for a 6TB 6U 250K
IOPS 200 µS
latency model).
GreenBytes
announced
it has raised an additional $12 million in Series B funding which the company
will use to expand sales and marketing of its
iSCSI compatble rackmount
SSD ASAPs. |
| .... |
| April 2012 - SCSI
Express initiative launched (SCSI for PCIe SSDs) |
STA announced support for a
new standard - SCSI Express (SCSI for
PCIe SSDs).
Violin
announced
it has secured $50 million in Series D funding, which the privately owned
company says gives it at an extrapolated market value of more than $800
million.
LSI
announced
details of its new
Nytro
family of SSD technologies - which integrate and join up several previously
standalone elements in its product line in a new unified marketing roadmap which
connects its legacy SAS software RAID controller stack to LSI/SandForce
controllers via SSD ASAP acceleration software and a compatible family of PCIe
SSD cards.
OCZ
launched what the company says - is the industry's
fastest IOPS
2.5" SATA MLC SSD
family (across a range of apps) - the
Vertex
4 (based on OCZ's own
regular RAM cache
Everest 2 controller) delivers 95K / 85K random
IOPS (4K
blocks) and 535 MB/s throughput.
Intel
launched
a new fast-enough
PCIe MLC SSD - the
910
Series has upto 800GB capacity ($3,859) and 180K / 75K R/W IOPS (4K blocks).
UBER is 1 sector per 1016 bits read.
Microsemi
announced it is
offering a new type of ruggedized
SATA connector option
for its its TRRUST-Stor
SSDs which provides a complete vibration-resistant solution which
eliminates pin fretting and intermittent disconnects to assure long-term
dependability.
Dataram
announced
it had sold its patents portfolio related to solid state storage and
SSD ASAPs for
$5 million to Phan Tia Group while retaining the right to continue using
these patents in its own current and future products.
DensBits announced it
is sampling a new SSD controller - the
DB3610 -
which supports the latest 2Xnm and 1Xnm TLC (3 bits/cell ) MLC flash with an
extreme endurance
figure of more than 10K P/E cycles and R/W performance of up to 95MB/s / 65MB/s
and 4,000 / 1,100 R/W
IOPS (4KB),
for sequential and random operations, respectively.
SMART announced that
it has figured out a way to get 5x more endurance from consumer grade
flash when using unmodified industry standard controllers from LSI/SandForce. The
technique - which is used in a new
fast-enough (enterprise
component) 2.5" SATA SSD product family sampling this quarter -
involves preconditioning parameters in the flash memory when the SSDs are
assembled (or at first boot) using intelligence gained from experience with
the company's population of closed-loop adaptive DSP controllers which are used
in its Optimus family. SMART applies a safety margin to compensate for the
open-loop aspect of these factors when managed by a SandForce controller to
which these underlying dynamics are invisible.
StorCloud changed its
name to Skyera. |
| .... |
| March 2012 -
Micron ships 2.5" PCIe SSDs |
STEC started shipping
CellCare MLC SSDs in
the Slim SATA / MO-297 SSD
form factor. The
MACH16
Slim SATA embedded SSD (pdf) has upto 50GB usable capacity, and
sustained R/W performance up to 245MB/s and 150MB/s respectively.
Hitachi GST (soon to be
part of WD)
announced
that its 2.5"
SAS
SLC SSD
product - the
Ultrastar
SSD400S is now shipping in EMC's
VNX
iSCSI arrays.
Micron
announced
that it has developed a 2.5"
form factor, hot swappable,
PCIe SSD which is
being used in Dell
servers.
UNH-IOL
announced it is
accepting founding members for the laboratory's new
NVMe Consortium
which will provide a vendor neutral location for members to test conformance of
their PCIe SSD related
products aimed at the NVMe compatible
market.
Marvell
announced
mass deployment of its new high speed 6Gbps SATA
SSD controller - the
88SS9187 which supports
regular RAM cache
(upto 1GB) and upto 500MB/s R/W even at dirty drive conditions. It supports
on-chip RAID technology
for the NAND device with flexible customer firmware based algorithms to optimize
retiring of
defective NAND block, plane, die or device and has the lowest power
consumption of any controller in this performance class.
Texas Memory Systems
introduced a new fast-enough
MLC PCIe SSD into its product line as part of an
SSD ASAP /
caching
bundle which includes software from NEVEX.
Memoright showcased its
HTM
series industrial SSDs - which using the company's proprietary adaptive
write / DSP controller technology expand MLC flash endurance from 3,000 to
5,000 cycles (legacy controller standard) upto 20,000 cycles. |
| .... |
| February 2012 - EMC
and Intel join the LSI-SandForce-inside set |
SanDisk
announced
it has acquired FlashSoft
- one of the leading independent software vendors in the
SSD ASAPs market.
Spin Transfer Technologies
announced
it has secured $36 million in Series A funding to accelerate development
of its patented orthogonal spin transfer magneto resistive random access memory
technology (OST-MRAM).
SMART Storage Systems
launched the
Optimus
Ultra (a 1.2TB 2.5" 100K/60K IOPS, 500MB/s R/W
SAS SSD) which uses
the company's new, in-house developed, high reliability enterprise SSD
controller IP - which includes DSP and adaptive programming techniques to
deliver industry leading SSD data integrity and upto 25x / day full disk
writes for 5 years endurance - while using low cost consumer grade MLC.
Greenliant Systems
has
started
volume shipments of its industrial grade rugged SATA SLC
SSDs on a chip (BGA -
14mm x 24mm x 1.95mm) -
NANDrive
GLS85LS - which have upto 8GB capacity, 70/60MB/s R/W, include zoneable
password security and
fast erase, and
strong power fail data
protection.
Intel
announced
it has used SandForce
controllers for the first time in its new (and fastest) SATA 3 2.5"
SSD - the
Intel
SSD 520 - which (with upto 80K R/W IOPS peak - 4KB) is aimed at gaming, CAD
and graphics content creation markets.
EMC
launched
its new PCIe SSD based product line - VFCache - which as widely reported last
month - leverages hardware designed by
LSI and incorporates
SandForce controllers.
Rambus
announced
it has acquired CMOx pioneer Unity
Semiconductor for an aggregate of $35 million in cash. As part of this
acquisition, the Unity team members have joined Rambus to continue developing
innovations and solutions for next-generation
non-volatile
memory.
NEVEX
announced a partnership agreement with
Texas Memory Systems -
which among other products includes software support for the
RamSan-70 (
PCIe SSD).
VIA has
selected
Tensilica's Xtensa dataplane
processors to use in a new design of SSD controllers.
GreenBytes announced
imminent availability of its first pure SSD based storage array. The
Solidarity is a
high availability
iSCSI 3U rackmount SSD
with real-time dedupe and
compression with upto 13.5TB raw capacity (60TB effective) and 120,000 4K
IOPS performance.
OCZ announced imminent
shipments of new high capacity
PCIe SSDs optimized
for cloud apps. The
Z-Drive
R4 CloudServ (which uses 16x
SandForce 2581 SSD
processors) has up to 16TB of storage capacity on a single full height
card and is supported by auto-caching
SSD ASAP
functionality (based on the acquisition of
SANRAD's
VXL) and OCZ's
VCA 2.0
which together enable host migrations without loss of performance or
interruption of service. |
| .... |
| 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.
TCS announced
shipments of its
Galatea
- a rugged 200GB 2.5" SLC SSD which has has been verified by outside labs
to meet MIL-STD-810 requirements for shock, vibration, temperature range,
temperature shock, humidity and altitude. The new 40K IOPS SSD includes 128-bit
AES encryption and
full drive fast erase
in less than 15 seconds.
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. |
| earlier SSD milestones |
2011 - SSD market
summary
SSD market
history - 1970s to 2011 |
|
|
