raw highlights from the
SSD news archive
by
Zsolt Kerekes,
editor - StorageSearch.com
see
also:-
What were the
big SSD ideas of 2015? |
|
| January highlights -
click for more |
Novachips acquired
HLNAND.
Toshiba
showed the 1st BGA PCIe SSDs.
"Storage-class 3D ReRAM will
ship in 2016" - said Tezzaron.
"Clearly
we're doing something right... XtremIO will be the fastest product we've ever
done that hits a billion dollars a year" - said EMC. |
|
| February highlights -
click for more |
Avago acquired
Emulex for $600
million.
Northwest
Logic provided FPGA support for Everspin's MRAM.
OCZ announced a
collaboration with Levyx to develop and
validate a flash-as-DRAM memory solution for big-data real-time
analytics.
FalconStor's
FreeStor made a pitch for the SSD platform market. (Now it's clear why it
has taken FalconStorso so many years to launch an SSDcentric next software
thing.)
Waitan
launched an autonomous self destruct SSD for the military market triggered
when 2 or more customizable trigger conditions had been met. (To avoid false
positives.) |
|
| March highlights -
click for more |
Toshiba sampled 48-layer
3D nand.
8TB 2.5" PCIe SSDs were promised soon by
Novachips
SanDisk launched a
white box rackmount SSD - InfiniFlash.
"That whole dominant
storage architecture thing has totally flipped... SAN is on the decline" -
said StorageGaga
"What
scares me is when companies fall into the trap of trying to architect a single
application to work across multiple different cloud providers...
Unfortunately, this effort eats into theFmit productivity gains that compelled
the organization to the cloud in the first place." - said AWS's Head of Enterprise
Strategy.
"Recently I've seen a resurgence in numbers of
industrial focused SSD companies" - said StorageSearch.com. |
|
| April highlights -
click for more |
WD's enterprise SSD
revenue was $1 billion / year run rate
Diablo resumed
shipments of MCS following legal victories.
Silicon Motion
agreed to acquire PCIe SSD maker - Shannon Systems for
$57 million.
Although I couldn't write about it at the time - in
April 2015 I noticed the start of a new trend - military SSDs wearing DWPD
badges too. This was a result of enterprise-like data architectures being
designed for off-grid powered systems in hostile environments with a new
design concept. The use of native military grade SSDs instead of repackaged
(higher swap footprint) enterprise systems. See my later blog about this -
toughening up DWPD
In April - the home page blog on StorageSearch.com said - "Now
consider this...
90% of the enterprise SSD companies which you know have no good reasons
to survive." - It came with the warning that it was the "most
dangerous new article of the year" (and it became onf of the most popular
too) -
drivers,
mechanisms and routes towards consolidation in the enterprise SSD market . |
|
| May highlights -
click for more |
Tegile got another $70
million funding.
OCZ
shipped 2.5" hot swap NVMe SSDs with programmable power envelopes.
Nimble's CEO commented
in an earnings conference call about the problem of his company being
perceived as only a hybrid storage supplier by potential customers who had
what they considered to be all flash applications. (Nimble started with hybrids
but now does AFAs too.)
"We're #1 in flash arrays."
"No
we are."
"You're both wrong - because we are."
3 different vendors announced enterprise flash array leadership at around the
same time based on similar raw market data. These claims were swiftly
dissected and disambiguated in a blog by Objective Analysis
This story exemplified one of the problems discussed in my classic article -
Can you
trust SSD market data? |
|
| June highlights -
click for more |
Nantero got $31
million funding for 300 C retention nvram.
Altera launched an
adaptive DSP controller for the PCIe SSD market in the same month it was
acquired by Intel.
"51%
of enterprise flash arrays customers expect to see an ROI in 12 months or less"
- according to survey results sponsored by Tegile.
"The
classic bath tub failure curve is not the most useful way of thinking
about PCIe SSD failures" - according to a large scale study of PCIe SSD
failures used in Facebook's infrastructure over a 4 year period.
34%
of FC SAN sites used custom performance scripts as part of their pre purchase
and deployment evaluations - according to a survey by Load DynamiX
"Longsys is the biggest
buyer of Samsung
flash in China, and our revenue is $800 million /year" - a spokesperson
from Longsys informed the editor of StorageSearch.com who up to that
time hadn't heard of the company before. (Shows how big the
market really is.) |
|
| July highlights -
click for more |
Micron was the #1
most researched SSD company in 1H July by readers of StorageSearch.com.
(Metrics were collected before the story broke that Tsinghua Unigroup was rumored to be
talking about acquiring Micron - and 2 weeks before the 3D XPoint
preannouncement with Intel.)
Savage IO's new
rackmount has most internal lanes of SAS than any other box.
Radian Memory Systems
was one of several SSD companies noted to be preening their emergence from
stealth mode in advance of the annual Flash Memory Summit.
"In
situ processing by application specific arrays of FPGAs integrated in the flash
array in regular servers is not a replacement for fat RAM servers - but can
deliver nearly the same apps performance at much lower cost and lower
electrical power" - paraphrase of key SSDcentric findings from
BlueDBM - an
experimental big data architecture project by MIT . |
|
| August higlights -
click for more |
Aupera launched the
world's first M.2 MRAM SSD.
Seagate said would
acquire Dot Hill
Systems for $694 million.
Pure Storage
filed documents for its IPO. (This showed that Pure had over 1,100 customers
and coincidentally - 1,100 employees. I asked myself and readers - is 1 to 1 a
sustainable ratio?"
Intel and Micron song and danced
their way around their mutual aspirations for future Optane memory (but
unlike Les Mis - this performance lacked
any hard edged gritty credibility).
Diablo launched Memory1
- a flash based replacement for big data DRAM. (The most significant
development in the enterprise flash market in the past 3 years.)
"Why
can't you just install a new storage solution from a different vendor, migrate
data from existing storage to new storage, decommission existing storage, and
move on?" - asked Maxta's
founder in his blog which discussed the past, present and future of storage
vendor lock-in. |
|
| September highlights -
click for more |
Mangstor got $10
million series B funding for fastest NVMe flash.
Crossbar got $35
million series D funding to make RRAM SSDs a reality in 2016.
"Marvell may have been
boosting quarterly sales by pulling them forward a quarter" - was one of
several quotes on
SeekingAlpha.com
as the reaction to Marvell's admission that its financial reporting included
unreliable elements.
"After numerous delays, a new wave of
next-generation, nonvolatile memories are finally here. One technology, 3D NAND,
is shipping and gaining steam. And 3 others - Magnetoresistive RAM, ReRAM and
even carbon nanotube RAMs - are suddenly in the mix" - said the Executive
Editor of Semiconductor Engineering
|
|
| October - highlights -
click for more |
With less than 90 shopping days remaining in the
run up to Christmas - this was a "spend it while you've still got it
month" for buying
SSD companies. The scale of some of these acquisitions led me to conclude
that "No SSD company is too big to be acquired" in my later article -
what were the 4
big SSD ideas in 2015?
Dell agreed to acquire
EMC for $67
billion.
Micron
acquired a stealth mode NVMe SSD controller company -
Tidal Systems
Skyworks agreed to acquire
PMC-Sierra
for $2 billion.
Western Digital first
beefed up its credit card by agreeing to sell 15% of its shares for $3.8
billion to UNIS after which WDC
said that if the approvals came through it would gobble up SanDisk for $19
billion. Between these 2 announcements SanDisk said it had agreed a technology
alliance with HP to
establish a Memristor based assault on the SCM DIMM wars front.
But
there was some real technical news too.
OCZ announced it was
offering adaptive
intelligence flow symmetry features in a new range of 2.5" SSDs -
but with a much better name - "Host Managed SSD Technology".
|
|
| November highlights -
click for more |
| Netlist announced it
was working with Samsung
to develop flash-as-RAM DIMMs. |
|
| December highlights? -
click for more |
Network Appliance
agreed to acquire SolidFire
for $870 million.
NxGn
Data was awared a research grant by the
National Science Foundation to advance
its prototype development in the new computing tier of in-situ SSD
processing. |
