by Zsolt Kerekes,
editor
Over 100 companies now market FC SAN SSDs.
The
first 5 companies to market fibre-channel SSDs in the late 1990s and early 2000s
were:- Solid Data Systems,
Imperial Technology,
Platypus Technology,
Texas Memory Systems
(all rackmounts)
and Curtis (which also
made the first
3.5" FC SSD).
These
were mostly rackmount systems - and in those early days they were all
RAM SSDs.
The
advantages of accelerating
legacy storage
with small amounts of fast SSD capacity had been known to systems architects
since the
1970s - but it was the standardization and market size offered by
SAN in the early 2000s when
it was becoming clear that
server processor
clocks and
hard
drive rotation speeds were flatlined - which made the
FC interface a pivotal
one for enterprise SSD makers.
The technical challenges of
tuning SANs with SSDs
were already well undestood and documented requirement by 2002. They only
disadvantage was they needed rare performance tuning engineers to analyze hot
spots to make the integrated SSD systems work affordably.
At that
time in the enterprise DAS SSD market - there was only one game in town -
parallel SCSI -
but that was soon eclipsed by
SATA (HDDs) - and
then by
SATA SSDs.
SAS never recovered
the dominant psoition which SCSI had held. And the
SAS SSD market was very
slow in taking off.
The first terabyte class FC SSD systems started
shipping in
February 2003.
The
earliest flash SSDs compatible with FC were from
BiTMICRO and
Gnutek (acquired by
STEC).
Other
notable FC SAN SSD companies include:-
- Dataram - who
shipped the 1st auto-teiring SSD ASAP compatible with FC
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