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23 years of SSD guides later...

but the memory systems market and this publisher are still "under construction"

by Zsolt Kerekes, editor - StorageSearch.com - April 7, 2017

For the past year as I've been writing about the fascinating transition to a multi-tiered and value nuanced memory systems market (in which once complicated SSDs are now viewed as the simple devices whose success has made the next revolution in the post modernist SSD era possible) I have wondered from time to time if I have been aiming too high and risked leaving too many readers behind who could find simpler and more comforting tales of SSDs elsewhere.

As a publisher since 1991 whose salary for over 20 years has come entirely from web advertising that question was more than a theoretical.

Lose too many good readers - or gain too many of the wrong sort - and that would be the end of that.

So I was happy to see that pageviews on StorageSearch.com in March 2017 grew 25% compared to the year ago period and readers grew 10%.

If you know about web marketing stuff and the diluting effect of seriously minded big content due to social media, mobile browsers and the dumbing down of content you'll appreciate that even standing in the place in the torrents of fickle web change is hard to do.

Thanks for caring so much about making a better future for this market.

Despite many revolutionary changes in memory systems design and adoption in the past decade we are still not at the stage where it's possible to predict and plot the next decade as merely an incremental set of refinements of what we've got now.

From time to time we can get glimpses of the challenges to come , however, and you can get a snapshot of the future architecture changes - as I see them - in my blog after AFAs - what's next?

PS - and did I mention the "advertising" word above. Since 2000 when StorageSearch.com ran the world's first web ads for enterprise SSDs on this site many of the world's pioneering SSD IP companies have funded StorageSearch.com in their formative and leadership years.

If you're a marketer in this industry and value the differences which you see on this site then contact me to ask about sponsorship / ad opportunities. I think we've got a few more years of massive changes yet to come. And I'd like to think my readers are still the most important people on the planet in our industry.

PPS - What does "under construction" in my headline allude to?

this construction icon is for industrial SSDs

this construction icon is for industrial SSDs

In the early days of the commercial world wide web (1995, 96 etc) many companies rushing to get onto the web pasted up a couple of pages of words and graphics and added a note saying "under construction".

Web marketing purists and SEO diviners frowned on such website design tactics and the "under construction" icons and text mostly disappeared through the dotcom bubble years. (I like the positive image of construction - personally - and use it for industrial SSDs as you may have seen.)

Nowadays whenever SSD vendors (small an huge) launch new websites and branding microsites you'll rarely see such an "under construction" sign - because professional marketers would like to create the illusion that they have always been there for you and are masters or mistresses of all they purvey.

The way I think about the SSD and memory systems market today - is that for sure - we have come a long way - and there have been many places where it seemed to many people that some kind of stasis had been reached. But it was always clear to some of those who analyzed the market and those who founded the next generations of disruptive startups - that these were merely resting places which were needed for the SSD ecosystem to see ahead and establish confidence on the way to the next recuperation area which is rumored to be somewhere still higher than we already climbed before and a mythical destination not yet pinpointed on any maps.

Newcomers to the market who joined when the earlier trails were already well served by paved roads and diners can't see what the fuss was about with the pioneering days. (And to be fair - it's not worthwhile spending too much time trying to understand these past complexities - unless you enjoy grappling with past business tranformations on a philosophical level.)

I guess what I'm saying is - the SSD market (which for me includes the memory systems market) is still very much "under construction".

Sanity suggests this degree of crazy changefulness will surely come to an end sometime. But before then we still have some more mad dashes for the next re-imagination resting point.

So if you see any websites which suggest that everything to come in SSD and memory is now safely predictable and this company or that company has solved all the critical problems. They might be right one day. But hey - this is the web. You can only trust yourself.

Later:- thanks for the responses to "under construction" on linkedin.

In my 40+ years of working in the electronics industry I judge that SSDs are 1 of the 3 most significant technological factors which have disrupted the digital systems market.

comparing the SSD market to earlier tech disruptions

why mice?
can you trust SSD market data?
miscellaneous consequences of the 2017 memory shortages

Should memory be bigger than storage?

after All Flash Arrays - what's next?

What we've got now is a new SSD market melting pot.

where are we heading with memory intensive systems?

You will learn something useful from the gap between ideal behavior and what you measure.

why RAMdisk emulation in flash tiered as RAM?

....

One trend has been for SSD makers to customize the controllers for their bigger cloud scale customers. But you can get better results more easily by customizing the data management of the SSDs and array using software instead - because software can intervene at multiple levels - both at the array and solo drive level.

sauce for the SSD box gander

....

Don't believe everything SSD companies tell you about the past, present or future of the SSD market.

7 tips to survive and thrive in enterprise SSD

All SSD systems in the market today are implementations of transient data architectures.

We haven't reached stability yet in reference enterprise designs and use cases.

what kind of SSD world? - outlook in January 2015

....

Many of the important and sometimes mysterious behavioral aspects of SSDs which predetermine their application limitations and usable market roles can only be understood when you look at how well the designer has dealt with managing the symmetries and asymmetries which are implicit in the underlying technologies which are contained within the SSD.

how fast can your SSD run backwards?

....

The enterprise SSD story...

why's the plot so complicated?

and was there ever a missed opportunity in the past to simplify it?

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How committed (really) are these companies
to the military SSD business?

a not so simple list of military SSD companies

Can you trust market reports and the handed down wisdom from analysts, bloggers and so-called industry experts?

heck no!

For over a decade one of the safest assumptions you could make about SSDs was - that if you were looking for excitement and big revenue growth opportunities - then the last place you should be looking was the industrial SSD market.

say farewell to reassuringly boring industrial SSDs

What is less clear is the direction of travel with tiered memory on the CPU itself.

optimizing CPUs for use with SSDs in the Post Modernist Era

Why buy SSDs?

6 user value propositions for buying SSDs

Why can't SSD's true believers agree on a single shared vision for the future of solid state storage?

the SSD Heresies