leading the way to the new (solid state) storage frontier ..... rackmount SSDs .. sugaring MLC .... HA SSDs PCIe SSDs .. auto caching SSDs .. RAM SSDs ..

Looking at the Fibre-Channel Solid State Drives Market 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 in the period from 2005 to 2009 included:- Solid Access Technologies - who shippped the world's first SAS compatible SSD rack Violin Memory - who (like Texas Memory Systems) were among the first to apply big SSD architecture to flash Dataram - who shipped the 1st auto-tiering SSD ASAP compatible with FC Other leading FC SAN rackmount SSD companies which entered the Top SSD Companies lists during the period from 2007 to 2013 included:- EMC Fusion-io IBM Kaminario Kove Nimbus Pure Storage Skyera Tegile WhipTail See also:- thinking inside the box (new rackmount SSD trends) . the evolution of enterprise flash Editor:- March 19, 2014 - If you follow SanDisk on twitter - @SanDiskDataCtr - you may have noticed they recently tweeted a link to one of my classic articles - the evolution of enterprise flash - a 10 year history One thing which hasn't changed since the early days of enterprise flash - is the concept of a "naughty" type of memory - which sensible, cautious types point at saying - that is never going to be reliable enough. . .
	"2 legs good, 2 wheels better." Megabyte was born to be wild. . SSD news the Fastest SSDs fibre-channel adapters the SSD Buyers Guide the Top SSD Companies MLC flash in enterprise SSDs Enterprise SSDs - Survivor Guide what do enterprise SSD users want? High Availability enterprise SSD arrays the Problem with Write IOPS - in flash SSDs Data Integrity Challenges in flash SSD Design RAM SSDs versus Flash SSDs - which is Best? Legacy versus New Dynasty in Enterprise SSDs Auto-tuning SSD Accelerated Pools of storage 7 SSD types will satisfy all future enterprise needs Rackmount SSDs - open vs proprietary architectures what do I need to know about any new rackmount SSD? Bottlenecks in the pure SSD datacenter will be more serious 90% of enterprise SSD companies have no good reasons to survive ... a classic ad from SSD market history ... no single point of failure lowest latency, highest density 1U FC SLC SSD the RamSan-720 - from Texas Memory Systems ... ... HA enterprise SSD arrays Due to the growing number of oems in the high availability / fault tolerant rackmount SSD market StorageSearch.com earlier this year published a directory dedicated to HA / FT enterprise SSD arrays.

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