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SSD history - 2013 month by month

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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
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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.

PernixData exited stealth mode and unveiled the company's Flash Virtualization Platform which virtualizes server-side flash into a scale-out data tier for enterprise data centers.
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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.
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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.

Reduxio raised $9 million in its first financing round from Carmel Ventures and Jerusalem Venture Partners - according to a report in Globes-Online.com.
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May 2013 - Fusion-io parts company with co-founders
Fusion-io announced that its co-founders - David Flynn (who had been CEO and President) and Rick White (who had been CMO) have resigned and will pursue future entrepreneurial investing activities together.

Memoright announced details of its first TLC SSDs. The XTM Series - are SATA SSDs for the consumer market which use the company's own adaptive R/W controller IP.

Micron announced it's sampling a new model in the hot swappable 2.5" PCIe SSDs market - the P420m has upto 1.4TB MLC capacity and can deliver 750K R IOPS. Micron specifies endurance as "50PB of drive life".

Pure Storage doubled the speed and density in its flash arrays with the launch of the FA-400 systems which include upto 24x 512GB SAS SSDs inside each 2U storage shelf. The company also announced an investment by In-Q-Tel (IQT) - a non profit ORG that identifies innovative technology solutions to support the missions of the US Intelligence Community.

Microsemi announced that it has secured multiple design-wins for its new Series 200 TRRUST-Stor (rugged self encrypting, 2.5" SATA SSD with 256GB SLC capacity which can do a full hardware-based erase in less than 8 seconds.

LSI announced it shipped over 40,000 PCIe SSDs in the past 12 months - and has been ranked the #2 merchant supplier of enterprise PCIe SSDs in the US, and the fastest growing in this category according to a recent report by Forward Insights

PernixData announced the close of an over-subscribed $20 million Series B funding round led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB).
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June 2013 - Stec will be acquired by WD's HGST
WD announced that it had agreed to acquire Stec for approximately $340 million. Stec will be absorbed into HGST.

Samsung entered the PCIe SSD market - with models aimed at notebooks.

Super Talent Technology launched a new entry level (800MB/s) PCIe hybrid SSD which combines 192GB of flash with an integrated hard drive.
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July 2013 - Samsung enters 2.5" PCIe SSD market
WD announced it had acquired VeloBit.

Samsung announced its entry into the 2.5" PCIe SSD market. Its NVMe SSD has upto 1.6TB capacity, read throughput upto 3GB/s, and up to 740K IOPS.

SanDisk announced a definitive agreement to acquire SMART Storage Systems for approximately $307 million.

SolidFire announced it has raised $31 million in series C funding which includes a new investor - Samsung Ventures.
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August 2013 - SMART samples ULLtraDIMM SSDs
Pure Storage -announced that it had closed an oversubscribed $150 million Series E funding round with institutional investors which brings the company's total capital raise to $245 million.

Violin Memory announced it has filed a registration statement form S-1 with the SEC relating to the proposed IPO of its common stock.

SMART Storage Systems announced it had begun sampling the first memory channel SSDs compatible with the interface and reference architecture created by Diablo Technologies. SMART's first generation enterprise ULLtraDIMM SSD (ULL = ultra-low latency) can be deployed via any existing DIMM slot and provides 200GB or 400GB of enterprise class flash SSD memory with upto 1GB/s and 760MB/s of sustained read/write performance, with 5 microseconds write latency.

Samsung announced production of 2.5" SATA SSDs aimed at the enterprise market - which use the company's new 128Gb 3D Vertical NAND flash memories.

Proton Digital Systems announced details of its new LDPC based FlashPro (a large architecture, adaptive DSP, controller ) platform which supports 1y-nm/1z-nm MLC, TLC and 3D Flash memory from all major NAND Flash manufacturers. FlashPro has upto 8 flash channels each supporting 533MBps and up to 32 Chip Enables per channel. Each media manager can support data transfer rates from 50MBps up to 4.27GBps.
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September 2013 -Micron samples first Hybrid Memory Cube devices
Violin Memory began trading on the NYSE Friday as "VMEM". The company got the money it wanted - $162 million - but those who bought at the original price didn't consider themselves quite so lucky. Business Insider commented on Violin's Awful IPO

IBM - which had been offering Fusion-io's ioDrive (PCIe SSD) technology in its product line since December 2009 became the first server oem to remarket the ioScale - a product described as having been optimized (price and feature set-wise) for huge end users in the SSD dark matter segment.

Micron began sampling the first implementation of the Hybrid Memory Cube. Micron's new SR (short reach) HMC provided 2GB DRAM in a BGA - with upto 160GB/s bandwidth.

WD completed the acquisition of Stec which the company said would be integrated into its enterprise SSD business subsidiary HGST. WD also announced it would acquire Virident Systems for approximately $685 million in cash.

Cisco announced its intention to acquire WhipTail for approximately $415 million in cash and retention-based incentives.
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October 2013 - Toshiba chooses DensBits' adaptive flash IP
Nimble Storage filed its FORM S-1 documents for an IPO.

OCZ announced that its filings had restored the compliance into compliance for its listing on NASDAQ.

DensBits announced that it has licensed its advanced Memory Modem technology (a variety of adaptive R/W and DSP flash controller IP) to Toshiba for use in new designs of SSDs.

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November 2013 - Primary Data gets $50 million funding, LSI samples "SSD market on a chip"
Maxta launched its first product - the Maxta Storage Platform - a hypervisor-agnostic software platform for repurposing arrays of standard servers (populated with cheap standard SATA SSDs and hard drives) into scalable enterprise class apps servers in which the global CPU and storage assets become available as an easily managed meta resource with optimized performance, cost and resilience.

LSI launched its 3rd generation SandForce SSD controller family - the SF3700 - which offered native SATA or gen 2 PCIe interfaces - and incorporated adaptive R/W DSP ECC management. StorageSearch.com described the underlying business concept as "SSD market on a chip" - and described the design as the most ambitious design of a single chip SSD controller in SSD market history.

Coho Data (which recently emerged from stealth mode and operates within the hybrid systems - SSD ASAPs market with a cloud market focus) announced it had got $25 million in Series B funding - led by new investor, Ignition Partners, and also including existing investor, Andreessen Horowitz.

EMC launched a legal suit against Pure Storage alledging that former EMC personnel had taken with them detailed customer related market information. Pure Storage responded that the complaint was without merit.

Primary Data - which had been founded less than 6 month earlier by the departure of the two cofounders of Fusion-io - announced it had secured a $50 million funding round.

OCZ announced that it would file for bankrupty and also said it had received an offer from Toshiba to acquire substantially all of its assets.
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December 2013 - LSI agrees to be acquired for $6.6 billion
Nimble Storage began trading on the NYSE as NMBL.

Violin Memory terminated the employment of its CEO Don Basile - who had been CEO of the company for the previous 4-5 years.

LSI announced that it had agreed to be acquired by Avago Technologies Limited in an all-cash transaction valued at $6.6 billion.

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