year of the FIO IPOby Zsolt Kerekes,
editor
In this article you'lll find a month by month summary (January
through to December) of the main technical and business milestones in the
SSD market in 2011. |
January
2011 - SandForce dedupes inside the SSD controller chip |
EMC revealed it had shipped 10
petabytes of SSD
storage in 2010.
Fusion-io
announced
a new distributor in Japan - Tokyo
Electron Device.
NeoMagic
announced it was seeking finance to help expand its IP and presence in the SSD
controller market.
TeleCommunication
Systems
acquired
Trident Space &
Defense.
A report in
DIGITIMES said
that Kingston Technology
is considering an investment in
SSD controller maker
JMicron.
Super Talent
Technology speeded up its
DuraDrive
range of 2.5" industrial SSDs with a new SATA model which has
sequential R/W speeds of 125MB/s, 110MB/s respectively.
StorageSearch.com published a new
article -
Inanimate Power,
Speed and Strength Metaphors in SSD brands - the 5th in a series about
Branding Strategies
in the SSD Market.
Alacritech
launched
the ANX
1500 ($70,000 base price) - a 2U
fat flash
SSD ASAP optimized
for the NAS market - which
the company claims can deliver 120,000 NFS OPS with 48GB of DRAM and up to 4TB
flash SSD.
StorageSearch.com
published a new edition of the
Top 20 SSD companies.
The 15th quarterly edition in this popular series is based on market data for
the 4th quarter of 2010.
An article
published
in Electronic Design revealed more about the thinking behind
SandForce's SSD controller
chips. Among other things it confirmed they
do
compression and dedupe as some of the tactics to manage
flash endurance.
Broadcast Engineering magazine
published a new article -
the
future of data storage - written by Zsolt Kerekes,
editor of StorageSearch.com. It's
2020 in the datacenter of a leading content factory. We used to call these
companies broadcasters... "...the only spinning devices in the storage
cabinets will be the cooling fans."
Texas Memory Systems
announced the availability of 8Gbps fibre-channel interfaces for its
RamSan-630 - fast 10TB
3U rackmount SLC SSDs. Each unit can be configured with upto 10 independent
8Gb FC ports for a total data transfer rate of 8 GBytes / sec. Ports can be
mixed - with the previously available (and 25% faster)
InfiniBand.
Fusion-io
announced
that in the past 12 months it had shipped more than 15 petabytes of its
enterprise flash SSD accelerators.
Xiotech joined the
crowding SSD ASAP
market with the
launch
of its Hybrid ISE - a 3U FC rack with 14TB of capacity and 60,000 IOPS
performance which internally uses a mixture of
2.5" SSDs and
HDDs. . |
February 2011 - SolidFire
and Violin get more funding |
SolidFire announced it
has raised $11 million in financing this month which followed an earlier seed
round of $1 million. The company is developing SSD enabled
cloud storage.
Nimbus Data Systems
announced that it had
achieved
profitability in its fiscal year ending December 31, 2010.
Dataram published
a
new benchmark white paper (pdf) which showed how EMC users could
significantly improve the performance obtainable from 15k RPM based
SAN storage arrays in
VMware environments at about 1/10th of the cost by using Dataram's
XcelaSAN (FC SAN
compatible SSD ASAP).
The simulated workload was based on a concept described in
VMware's
100K IOPS, one ESX host blog (2008).
OCZ's CEO, Ryan Petersen
revealed in a new article on
bnet.com
the difficulties he faced when he decided his business had to quit the
memory business and focus on SSDs. The fast growing company also announced
a
new loan agreement with Silicon Valley Bank.
Violin Memory
announced
a $35 Million Series B funding round which includes
Toshiba - a strategic
investor since April 2010.
SandForce shipped more
than one million of its
SF-1500 and SF-1200 SSD
Processors since they were released into production in 2010.
SandForce
Driven SSD Manufacturers shipped more than 100 Petabytes of NAND flash into
the mainstream computing markets.
STEC
announced
that its revenue for full-year 2010 was $280 million, a decrease of
20.9% from $354.2 million for 2009. StorageSearch.com commented - "At
the current rate of progress STEC's SSD revenue - on the way down - may
intersect with that of
OCZ during 2011 going up -
contrasting the fortunes of a company (STEC) which once had technical
leadership in the SSD market - with a company (OCZ) which never had technical
leadership in any SSD segment - but knows how to market and sell SSDs."
PhotoFast announced it
will start shipping
2.5" SATA 3
SSDs with 450MB/s write speeds and upto to 512GB capacity ($800 MSRP) to
customers in Japan in April.
SanDisk preannounced
details of a new miniature
SSD which will ship in Q3 2011 - the
iNAND
has upto 64GB (x3 MLC) capacity in a 12mm x 16mm x 1mm package.
Extreme Engineering Solutions
announced the availability of the
XPort6103 - a
conduction- or air-cooled rugged XMC form factor PCIe SLC SSD with upto
512GB capacity designed for MIL-STD-810F environments. Encryption is NIST-
and CSE-certified. Declassification is via
hardware or software
control.
StorageSearch.com
published a new article -
what happens
in SSDs when power goes down? - which surveyed SSD internal power
management architectures and characteristics.
Dataram announced
availability of its
XcelaSAN
Model 100 - a new version of its rackmount
FC SAN compatible SSD
ASAP - with improved
HA features.
SandForce
announced availability of its 2nd generation SF-2200 processors optimized
for SSDs deployed in client computing applications. This enables SSD makers to
deliver 500MB/s R/W throughput (6Gbps SATA) and 20K sustained and 60K burst
IOPS - and
are compatible with newly available ONFi2 and toggle flash memory from all
major suppliers. The new chips can be oem configured to suit various consumer
markets, for example by intelligently limiting the power (performance is
optimized within a preset wattage envelope) and / or removing internal RAID
features (to make more capacity available to users).
Intel
launched
the SSD 510 - a 2.5"
SATA 3 MLC SSD with
250GB capacity and upto 315MB/s sequential write performance. Unusually for
Intel SSDs - a week after the product was launched it was not recalled and
neither was it subject to a vital firmware upgrade. . |
March 2011 - OCZ
acquires Indilinx, Fusion-io announces IPO, WD acquires Hitachi GST |
Fusion-io
announced
it has filed with the SEC for a proposed IPO.
StorageSearch.com published a new
article - the 3
fastest PCIe SSDs list(s).
OCZ announced it has signed
a definitive agreement to acquire
Indilinx for for
approximately $32 million.
Pangaea Media
entered the SSD backup market
with a 2.5" SSD which uses a completely new
fast purge
technology.
StorageSearch.com
published a new edition of the
SSD Bookmarks -
with
suggestions by
Jack H Winters,
CTO, Foremay .
WD announced it will
acquire Hitachi GST
for approximately $4.3 billion. Although the primary motive is
hard drives - the
companies said they would put more resources into SSDs too.
StorageSearch.com published -
the Top 30 SSD
articles - a new weekly updated list which includes summaries of the most
popular articles viewed by our readers.
iSuppli announced
SSD
revenue in 2011 is projected to hit $4.4 billion, up 91% from $2.3
billion in 2010. By 2014, iSuppli expects SSD revenue to reach $7.2 billion.
Foremay today announced it
is shipping 32GB PATA
versions of its
OC177
SSD Disk on Chip which measures 22 x 22 x 1.8 mm and has R/W speeds of 70
and 40MB/s respectively.
Intel published version
1.0 of a new proprietary standard for designers of
PCI SSDs in systems
which use Intel processors - the
NVM Express Optimized PCI
Express SSD Interface.
Seagate announced details
of new 2.5"
SAS SSDs - marketed
under its Pulsar brand
- which will ship in the 2nd quarter. Available capacities are 400GB (SLC) and
800GB (MLC). R/W speeds are upto 360MB/s and 300MB/s respectively.
Sustainable random R/W
IOPS are
48K and 22K respectively.
Anobit announced that
it has commenced high volume production of its
MSP2020 NAND
flash memory controller in cooperation with
Hynix Semiconductor. The
MSP2020 controller enables the use of commercial-grade 2-bits-per-cell and
3-bits-per-cell NAND flash across all of the latest process nodes, within
endurance- and performance-intensive embedded computing applications. MSP2020
controllers support up to 2 ONFI-compliant NAND interfaces to a host processor,
and can support product configurations from 4GB to 128GB.
Microsemi
announced
initial production and availability of its
TRRUST-Stor a rugged
2.5" SATA SSD designed for mission critical applications in the
aerospace, defense, and military markets. Security features in the new SSD
include:- AES encryption with a 256-bit key with XTS, a
fast purge feature
called SnapPurge which destroys key in less than 30mS and hardware-based fast
clear of the entire drive which takes less than 4 seconds. Uncorrectable bit
error rate is one sector per 1030 bits read. Other reliability
oriented features include:- Built-In-Self-Test (BIST) and
power
interruption protection with over and under voltage detection and protection
which does not rely on super caps or batteries.
Intel launched a new
2.5" SSD aimed at
legacy notebook
designs which have 3Gbps SATA
ports. The
Intel
SSD 320 (which includes 128 bit encryption) is available with MLC
capacities from 40GB ($89 1k price) to 600GB ($1,069 1k). R/W speeds are
270MB/s and 220MB/s respectively. R/W
IOPS are
39,500 and 23,000. In this new design , Intel has added redundancies that
will help keep user data protected, even in the
event of a
power loss.
Kaminario
announced immediate availability of its
K2
DRAM storage appliance a family of enterprise
FC SAN
rackmount
RAM SSDs which scales
up to 12TB and delivers 1.5 million IOPS with 16 GB/s throughput. K2's entry
level configuration provides 500GB of storage and delivers 150,000 IOPS with
1.6 GB/s throughput for $50,000. Kaminario's K2 has true N+1 high
availability, including mirrored storage with automatic data recovery, redundant
fibre channel connectivity and a UPS, to reduce the risk of losing data access.
Web-Feet
Research said they expect the embedded flash drive market to approach
$17 billion annual revenue in 2015. In Web-Feet 's usage - "EFDs
provide internal storage functions in mobile, consumer and some compute
applications. They are the non-removable Flash storage positioned between Flash
cards, found in many of these same applications, and SSDs. As the EFD evolves
they take on many controller features found in the low end
SSDs." More details
about their predictions are in their annual report (130+ pages, $6,500,
outline
pdf)
PLX
Technology (supplier of 65% of the world's PCIe switch chips)
announced it's
working with system partners worldwide to accelerate adoption of
PCIe SSDs.
StoneFly
announced
that it will integrate Fusion-io's
ioMemory accelerators into its
iSCSI storage systems.
|
. |
April 2011 - Virident
does 1 million IOPS with 2 PCIe SSD cards |
StorageSearch.com published the 16th
quarterly edition of the
top 20 SSD companies
- based on metrics in the 1st quarter of 2011.
SMART announced
the release of its
XceedIOPS2
6Gb/s SATA SSDs in 1.8"
and 2.5" form
factors which use with the latest
SandForce SF-2000
series SSD processors.
Virident Systems
announced that
working with SGI they
demonstrated 1 million IOPS performance in a 1U server rack using just 2 of
its tachIOn
PCIe SSDs at a system
list price of less than $.05 per IOPS.
Anobit announced it has
licensed IP cores from
Cosmic
Circuits for several of its SoCs. The analog IPs which consisted of
linear regulators, a
power-on-reset
and a silicon oscillator (with integrated clock multiplier) were implemented in
65nm CMOS process. These IPs were integrated into Anobit's
flash memory controllers
to enhance reliability
and performance.
ADLINK Technology
launched
a range of 6Gbps SATA
industrial 1.8"
and 2.5" SSDs with R/W speeds upto 470MB/s and 385MB/s respectively (for
SLC models).
Marvell
unveiled a
PCIe compatible
SSD ASAP. Marvell
claims 10x speedups can be realized using its new
DragonFly
Virtual Storage Accelerator - which is designed to reduce
write amplification
to external storage arrays and acts as an OS agnostic multiprotocol storage
cache for NAS,
SAN or
DAS storage arrays.
The product - is expected to sample in Q3.
Macrotron
announced the
availability of 1.8" ZIF MLC SSDs which have R/W speeds upto
120/85MB/s and 30GB ($115) to 240GB ($615) capacity.
IO Turbine popped out
of stealth mode and announced it has secured $7.75 million in funding to
design software for high IOPS virtual flash SSD environments. .
Web-Feet Research has
added a quarterly SSD company SWOT market analysis service to its range of
SSD reports. Web-Feet says that given the large number of players in the
SSD market, it is not an easy task profiling each company from a competitive
position. Their new publication covers 30 notable companies with SWOT analysis
along with product summaries and other information to help compare companies
with each other.
Dataram
has doubled the RAM cache available in its
XcelaSAN
(2U rackmount fibre-channel SAN
SSD accelerator) to
256GB (the system price is approx $75,000). XcelaSAN delivers up to 30x
transparent R/W acceleration to attached disk storage arrays with a
high-availability architecture (internal performance is
upto
450,000 IOPS). Unlike most solid state storage solutions, XcelaSAN
dynamically caches high I/O activity application data when it is needed, to
support multiple applications many times larger than the cache itself.
Web-Feet Research
has added a quarterly SSD company SWOT market analysis service to its
range of SSD reports. Their new publication ($7,500 for 1 year) covers
30 notable SSD companies with SWOT analysis along with product summaries and
other information to help compare companies with each other.
Samsung announced it is
exiting
the hard disk market.
Seagate has agreed to
acquire Samsung's HDD assets for $1.375 billion. |
. |
May 2011
- IPO prices Fusion-io 3x more valuable than Pliant |
Fusion-io's
IPO
pricing indicates a $1 billion market cap SSD company.
SanDisk announced a
definitive
agreement to acquire Pliant
Technology for approximately $327 million.
SandForce named
DriveSavers (a
data recovery company)
as a member of its trusted partners program.
IO Turbine announced
that its flash SSD supporting acceleration software for VMware environments was
available for beta testing.
Texas Memory Systems
unveiled imminent availability of a new fast
PCIe SSD - the
RamSan-70
- a 900GB (SLC) 1/2 length card with 330K / 160K R/W IOPS and upto 2GB/s
throughput.
Microsemi
announced that its TRRUST-STOR
(2.5" rugged SSDs) are the industry's first SSDs to pass zero-failure
testing at vibration
levels that are consistent with the industry's most severe environments.
STEC announced
it will transition the hardware used in its high performance
ZeusIOPS (2.5" and
3.5") SSDs from a
dependence on FPGAs to ASICs. And the same ASIC design will be used in
new PCIe SSDs later
this year. The company's revenue in the 1st quarter of 2011 was 2.5x the level
of the preceding year - breaking a year of under par revenue results for
the company - compared to the trend for its leading competitors in the
enterprise SSD market.
SMART began sampling
a new 64GB 1.8"
Slim (39x54x4mm ) SATA SLC SSD for embedded applications. The XceedIOPS iSATA
Slim has a typical power consumption of 0.5W at +5VDC and supports automatic
5V/3.3V input power selection. R/W throughput is upto 120/115MB/s and
14K/1.4K R/W IOPS.
Kaminario
announced it
has secured $15 million in Series C funding bringing its total investor
funding to $34 million.
EMC
announced
it has created a flash business unit and will enter the
PCIe SSD market later
this year. The company indicated that its run rate of shipping flash storage
array capacity in 2011 is approximately 3x the level it had achieved in
2010.
Fusion-io
announced
that more of its PCIe SSDs
(including 640GB ioDrives and the 1.28TB Duo) are
now available
from Dell - which is also extending the number of server platforms
supporting these accelerator options.
Emphase
launched a new
range of rugged, MIL-STD-810F compliant 2.5" SATA SLC SSDs - which are
currently available with upto 128GB capacity. The
MIL-SPEC S5
SSD has R/W speeds upto 170 / 90MB/sec respectively and
fast erase. Should
the drive lose power during a protect, erase, or destroy command, the device
will resume the operation as soon as power is restored. Standard product has
high tolerance for high altitudes, shock, vibration, temperature, and humidity -
options include conformal coating.
Texas Memory Systems
announced
record-setting audited SPC-1
and SPC-2 performance results produced by its flagship rackmount SSD -
the RamSan-630. What's
significant about these results - is that the SLC flash SSD system cost
less per gigabyte than the previous record holder's HDD based system. |
. |
June 2011
- FlashSoft ships auto tiering SSD software for Windows Server |
Kove announced it had
achieved over 11 million IOPS in a single addressable space in its XPD2 - 4U
rackmount SSD.
Virident
Systems announced that it has been chosen as a winner of the
Red Herring Top
100.
VeloBit
announced
it had received Series A funding to develop its software for leveraging
traditional SAS /
SATA SSDs as caches
in SSD ASAP
environments.
SolidFire
announced details of its first product - an
iSCSI SSD appliance
designed for cloud storage
applications which the company says can scale to 1 petabyte capacity (which
takes 100 nodes with current models).
NVSL ( the Non-Volatile Systems Lab at UCSD)
demonstrated
a prototype PCIe PCM (phase-change memory) SSD - with R/W speeds upto 1.1GB/s
and 327MB/s respectively and 8GB usable capacity. In a white paper
Protoype
PCM Storage Array (pdf) the team outlines the design and architecture of
their PCM SSD prototype and also compares aspects of performance with entry
level PCIe flash SSDs from
Fusion-io.
Violin Memory
announced
a $40 Million Series C funding round - just
4 months after
the company had raised $35 Million in Series B funding.
Texas Memory Systems
announced imminent availability of the
RamSan-710
- a 1U rackmount
SSD with 5TB usable SLC flash storage with 2 dual ported 8Gbps
FC ports upto 2 40Gbps
InfiniBand ports.
Throughput is quoted as 5 GB/s - although no IOPS figure was mentioned at press
time. The system includes various
reliability
options- including N+1 batteries to support orderly
shutdown
and an internal active spare flash card configuration option which provides
protection levels beyond RAID.
SandForce
announced
that a single SSD using its SF-2000 SSD Processor
along with 25nm MLC flash memory has achieved the highest possible WEI score
of 7.9 for the disk data transfer rate in a Windows 7 environment (3.5GHz AMD
CPU with 8GB 1.3GHz RAM). The company also announced that
Kingston Technology
has joined the
SandForce
Driven SSDs group - bringing the membership upto 30 companies.
Micron
announced
it is sampling the first products in a new family which will ship in the 3rd
quarter of this year. The company says its
RealSSD
P320h drive delivers upto 750K / 341K R/W
IOPS, and
3GB/s / 2GB/s R/W throughput. It uses Micron's own 34nm SLC ONFI 2.1 NAND
flash and has on-board
RAM cache.
SanDisk
expanded its
Lightning
range (2.5"
and 3.5"
SAS
skinny flash
SSDs) which now offer upto 800GB MLC capacity. The new models are being
delivered for OEM qualification, and will be available via authorized channel
partners in Q3, 2011.
Emphase announced a
new range of
miniature industrial SATA SLC SSDs which have been engineered to
operate off as little as 0.5 watts max and fit into less than 4mm height.
Capacities range from 1GB to 32GB. R/W speeds upto 120/100MB/s. All S3 Series
SATA modules come with a tightly managed BOM and a 5-year warranty, with the
option for conformal coating.
FlashSoft announced
it has
secured
$3 million Series A funding and has launched its first product -
software which enables enterprise flash to be used as a cost-effective,
server-tier computing resource (ASAP functionality in
software) which is available for free evaluation through a 30-day "Try
Before You Buy" program.
AMP launched the
CineDrive
a low power, rugged 2.5" SATA SSD optimized for the video recording
industry.
Oracle
announced it has
entered into an agreement to acquire
Pillar Data Systems -
which was already majority owned by Oracle CEO Larry Ellison.
SANBlaze Technology
started shipping a new
rear
transition module which connects upto 8x
1.8" SSDs to
PCIe with
RAID options.
|
. |
July 2011 -
OCZ elevates performance of Indilinx SSD controllers |
Violin Memory anoounced it
had been named
"company
of the year" by AlwaysOn.
RunCore has opened its
first international sales office outside its its original roots in China.
The new office - which will handle sales and distribution is in San Jose,
California. The company also
launched a
6Gbps mSATA SSD based on the
SandForce SF-2281
controller - with R/W rates upto 550 MB/s and 470 MB/s respectively and upto
120GB capacity.
StorageSearch.com
published the 17th quarterly edition of the
top 20 SSD companies
- based on metrics in the 2nd quarter of 2011. 4 companies dropped out of the
list from the previous quarter - and there was a first time appearance by
enterprise SSD maker
Virident Systems.
Web-Feet Research
published a new quarterly edition of its SSD market report series (annual
subscription $7,500). You can see the
introduction
and summary here (pdf) - where among other things you'll learn... "Adoption
of SSDs in client and enterprise applications gained momentum in
2010 with
shipments and revenue doubling to 10.3 million units and $2.6 billion. The
outlook for 2011 is 16.6 million units and $4.1 billion in revenue
demonstrating continued strong growth."
NVELO
announced it had $6.6
million in series A funding to support its business development in the PC
segment of the SSD
caching / SSD ASAP software market.
OCZ is sampling a new dual
core ARM based SSD
controller for 6Gbps SATA
SSDs which can deliver upto 500MB/s sequential throughput and 200 mega
transfers per second. The
Indilinx Everest
platform supports up to 1x nm NAND Flash with 1, 2, or 3 bits per cell,
has 70 bits of BCH ECC
per sector, end to end data protection, fast boot options (50% faster than
competing SSDs) and enhanced
power fail
protection. The new platform - supports 1TB flash capacity and has a
400MHz DDR3 DRAM
cache interface with support for up to 512MB.
MOSAID Technologies said
it will sample silicon based on its
HLNAND2 specification in
late 2011. Using a high-speed, point-to-point ring topology, HLNAND2
facilitates SSD development with data transfer rates into the multiple
Gigabyte-per-second range. In comparison, NAND Flash interfaces based on a
parallel bus structure are limited to transfer rates of up to 200MB/s, with only
a few devices supported on each channel. The company's HLNAND 256Gb Flash
memory device is packaged as an MCP composed of a stack of 9 dies - 8
industry-standard NAND Flash chips, and 1 MOSAID proprietary ASIC. The design
supports either monolithic 32Gb MLC Toggle Mode or 32Gb MLC legacy asynchronous
NAND Flash chips, evenly distributed over 4 banks.
Huawei Symantec launched
its first SSD system - a 2U FC
SAN SSD with hot swap features, and 2.4TB usable capacity implemented by
a RAID aray of its own
design 2.5" SLC SSDs. The
Oceanspace
Dorado2100 has 800 microsends access time, 170,000 IOPS, and 8x 8Gbps ports
with 2 controllers and multipath connections.
NAID announced
it had
started plans to develop a new certification program to verify the
security and processes of companies that removed data from solid state memory
devices and mobile phones. |
. |
August 2011 - FIO's revenue
6x higher, auto tiering heats up |
Samsung has acquired
Grandis - an
nv
RAM company which has been developing spin transfer torque random access
memory (STT-RAM).
RunCore
announced
it is building the biggest SSD factory in China to enable the company to cope
with the increasing international demand for its products. The new factory and
test facility - based in Jinzhou Development Zone in Changsha city - is
expected to be complete in early 2012.
SANRAD introduced the
industry's 1st front loadable
PCIe flash SSD
accelerators as options in its V-Switch storage appliances enabling
upto 4TB of flash, together with
2x10GE networking and
2x8Gb FC, all in a single
1U rackmount appliance (or 10TB in 2U).
Hyperstone
introduced their new A2
family of SSD
controllers - designed to enable physically small, very low power
consumption industrial
SATA
skinny flash
SSDs.
Nimbus Data
Systems announced that eBay has deployed more than 100 terabytes of
Nimbus S-Class flash memory to power its VMware virtual server infrastructure.
The Nimbus solution delivered near line-rate 10 Gbps iSCSI performance to the
VMware hosts while consuming 78% less energy and 50% less rackspace than
conventional disk-based
solutions.
Pure Storage
unveiled its first SSD product (an
FC SAN compatible bulk
storage SSD) and announced it had received $30 million in series C funding
bringing its total capital funding up to $55 million.
In a
white
paper (pdf) presented at the Flash
Memory Summit -
Rado Danilak,
founder of StorCloud
said that RAID / RAIS
technology and the other clever
SSD controller
techniques that the industry has learned to lean on in the past few years "...will
not sufficient for advanced node MLC to be used in enterprise... But - StorCloud
has identified technical solutions for next 10x improvement in
endurance
and enabling 1x nm MLC in enterprise storage systems..."
OCZ has started shipments of
its latest PCIe SSD - the
Z-Drive
R4 which is capable of transferring up to 2.8GB/s and completing over
500,000 IOPS. A dual SuperScale controller card reaches 5.6GB/s and 1.2 million
IOPS. OCZ's software enables user-selectable data recovery and non-stop
configuration modes ensuring enterprise-class data integrity. It also
supports the industry-standard SCSI
command set and TRIM/SCSI Unmap.
STEC
announced
it is sampling a new software SSD ASAP product - called EnhanceIO - a
cross-platform cache solution that works with any SSD to accelerate enterprise
applications, however, it is optimized for STEC SSD devices. The company also
started sampling its previously unveiled PCIe SSD family.
Fusion-io announced
that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire
IO Turbine for
approximately $95 million. And Fusion-io
reported
revenue of $72 million for the fiscal fourth quarter of 2011 - 6x
higher than the year ago quarter.
Texas Memory Systems
launched the
RamSan-810
- a 10TB FC SAN MLC SSD in
a 1U rackmount
package - with 320K IOPS performance.
SMART
launched
a new range of 2.5" SAS
SSDs which provide upto 1.6TB usable capacity, 100K/50K random IOPS and
500MB/s sustained R/W transfer rates.
Foremay announced that
it has shipped SSDs from its
SC199
Hi-Rel range for deployment in NASA's
next generation space program.
Coraid unveiled
a
new version of its 10GbE AoE
compatible 4U rackmount storage - the
EtherFlash solution -
which integrates commodity SAS
or SATA SSDs at a
system price under $10/GB with less than 200 microseconds latency.
OCZ
launched a
hybrid
PCIe SSD - the
RevoDrive Hybrid - which integrates 100GB SSD capacity along with an onboard 1TB
HDD and
SSD ASAP / auto hot spot
cache tuning controller capable of 910MB/s peak throughput and upto random
write 120,000 IOPS (4K) at an MSRP under $500.
StorageSearch.com reported that reader
interest in auto tiering
SSDs had shot up 34 places in August - making it the fastest
growing topic in the
top SSD articles. |
. |
September 2011 - Anobit
joins the high performance 2.5" MLC set |
GridIron Systems
announced
general availability of its
TurboCharger
- an FC SAN
fat flash
SSD ASAP / auto-tiering
cache - which has low latency (tens of microseconds) and is intended to be
used in what the company calls "Big data" installations.
Violin Memory
announced
new models and options in its range of fast
iSCSI /
FC SAN rackmount SSDs.
The new
6000
series - designed for high availability applications with no single point
of failure and hot swappable "everything" - provides 12TB SLC, or
22TB MLC usable capacity with 200/600 microseconds mixed latency, 1 million /
500K sustained RAIDed spike free write IOPS, in 3U rackspace at a list price
around $37K / $20K per terabyte.
Microsemi
announced it's
shipping secure rugged SATA SSD chips for embedded defense applications with
upto 75GB SLC capacity in a single 32mm x 28mm PBGA (plastic ball grid array).
Dataram
announced
that
Dell
OEM Solutions will manufacture and support Dataram's
FC SAN compatible
auto-tiering / SSD ASAP
- the XcelaSAN from
November 2011.
Fusion-io
announced
that its new SureErase data
sanitization tool has been confirmed as meeting Department of Defense
sanitization standards by the Defense Information Systems Agency. SureErase
enables users to securely remove/erase all data on any ioMemory-based
technology, following DoD/NIST standards, regardless of capacity, in less than 1
minute.
OCZ launched its
Synapse
Cache Series 2.5" SATA SSDs for Windows 7 environments. The new SSDs
(64GB / 128GB, R/W speeds upto 510/550MB/s, 80,000 IOPS) integrate
NVELO's
Dataplex
cache / SSD ASAP
software to dynamically manage the SSD in conjunction with standard
hard disk drives. When
used to support a pre-existing terabyte hard drive - the overall performance for
popular PC benchmar tasks can be 4x to 6x faster - as the
software learns the where the hot data is for that user's PC - according to
benchmarks and data in
OCZ's
related white paper (pdf)
. No data migration or OS installation is required.
Anobit
announced it is
sampling the fastest (yet) 2.5"
SATA SSDs based on its
own controller design. The new
Genesis
SSDs (upto 400GB) delivers up to 70,000/40,000
IOPS (4K
block size) and 510 MB/s sequential read/write with non-compressible data
using 2xnm MLC NAND. Anobit says its patented Memory Signal Processing
technology elevates
MLC endurance
from 3,000 write cycles to over 50,000.
OCZ
announced it's
been supplying custom 7.5mm high 128GB SATA SSDs which use its Indilinx
Everest SSD controller to LG for use in its in
LGP220
ultra-thin notebooks. See also
SSD controller news,
notebook SSDs.
SANRAD entered the
auto-tiering SSD / SSD
ASAPs market (22 vendors listed in that directory) with the launch of its
VXL software which supports its
family of FC and GbE
unified storage network
routers.
RunCore
started sampling a low power SATA SSD chip - in a BGA micro-chip package for
embedded apps like mobile phones and tablet PCs. The rSSD T100 will be available
in
industrial
temperature versions - and includes SMART commands to monitor the life
expectancy of the product. ...read
more in 1" SSD news
Kaminario
announced
it has integrated Fusion-io's
PCIe SSDs as a new
option in its
K2
FC SAN compatible SSD
product line (which was hitherto
RAM SSD only) to
provide flash and
hybrid storage
options. Using the new options the K2 can provide from 3 to 30TB of non-stop,
protected and self healing, blade server based flash storage in 4U to 12U of
rack space with R/W latency of 260 / 150 microseconds at a list price of $30K /
TB. ...read more in SSD
news
Intel
launched
a new 2.5" SATA
MLC SSD for
hard drive replacement
in datacenters. The
710
series (1K unit price is $1,929 for 300GB) has low performance (by SSD
standards) - with random R/W IOPS of 38,500 IOPS and 2,700 respectively. But
this performance is more than good enough for use in general purpose, value
engineered, bulk storage arrays. |
. |
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.
|
. |
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:-
|
. |
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.
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).
XtremIO secured a 2nd
round of funding in December 2011 - from various source including
Lightspeed Venture Partners -
bringing its total funding upto $25 million.
new SSD articles
on StorageSearch.com this month
include:-
|
. |
what happened next? -
see SSD news
what
happened earlier? - see
SSD history
other
SSD articles? - see
the top 50 SSD
articles (updated monthly) | |
....... |
SSDs - what
changed in 2011? |
Editor:- what were
the 3 most significant changes in the SSD market in 2011?
|
1 - There's money to be
made in SSDs (one day) so (some) SSD companies are valuable.
Fusion-io's IPO
early in the year kicked the SSD market into the attention of many investors who
had never thought about this market before. FIO's valuation validated many
other rounds of VC investment in SSD companies. This year companies like
Pliant and
SandForce were each
being acquired for dollar amounts which were nearly as big as the total SSD
market revenue had been just a handful of years before.
The SSD market is going to grow
big and fast.
And what else can
VCs do with their
money? Lend it to the
Eurozone
bank bail-out fund? | |
|
2 - The old evangelical
style arguments about using "good" SLC versus "naughty" MLC
in mission critical server apps changed in 2011.
Is
it safe to for enterprise servers to have close relations with naughty flash?
Yeah. But wear protection. And you might need to take some data
healing pills after.
The new
enterprise MLC
SSD debate in 2011 switched to - "which brand of naughty flash
enterprise protection is best?" | |
|
3 - SSD
software started to become real and useful. |
An important inhibitor
in the enterprise SSD market until 2011 was that users "knew" they
couldn't afford to replace all their storage with SSDs (yet) but the question
of deciding where to put a little bit of SSD so it would do most good didn't
have any simple answers.
The cost and complexity of getting
performance tuning experts (SSD hot-spot, hot-shots) to
analyze existing systems
and tune the
enterprise apps storage remained out of reach for most mortals whose
storage ROI models didn't convert faster IOPS directly into cash.
But
2 years after the magic bullet of
auto-tiering / SSD ASAPs
started to appear in the market - some of these solutions looked like they might
actually work - and in the 3rd quarter of 2011 - new ISVs were entering the SSD
market at the rate of one a week. And SSD ISVs entered the
top 20 SSD companies
list too - for the first time ever.
In 2011 - we learned that
from FIO's acquisition of IO
Turbine that (some) SSD ISVs are valuable too.
Think of SSD
software as being able to convert raw SSD gold into SSD jewelry.
If enough users like the style the end-result is worth a lot more than the
scrap value. | |
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IDC
confirms SSD market revenue doubled in 2011 |
Editor:- January 9, 2012 - worldwide SSD
revenue doubled and reached $5 billion in
2011 -
according to a
report by IDC.
See also:- SSD market
analysts. | | |
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