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PCIe SSDsPCIe SSDs have been shipping in the market since 2007.It's one of the most popular SSD subjects pursued by our readers and has been for the past 4 years. Over 40 companies already ship PCIe SSDs. (See partial list on the right.) That will rise to over 100 companies as the availability of more PCIe supporting SSD controller chips, other SSD related chip sets and IP and SSD software for this market will make it even easier than it already is for newcomers to enter the PCIe SSDs market. PCIe SSDs come in several shapes and sizes. The most familiar form factor is cards, modules and racks. But a new form factor - for 2.5" PCIe SSDs which emerged last year will open up new applications - such as displacement of fast SAS SSDs. | ||||||
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| the 3 fastest PCIe
flash SSDs Optimizing PCIe SSD design performance don't all PCIe SSDs look pretty much the same? Enterprise SSDs - the Survive and Thrive Guide how will Memory Channel Storage impact PCIe SSDs? PCIe SSDs?- just 1 of 7 silos in the pure SSD datacenter |
| PCIe SSD oems (partial list) from past SSD news and articles |
| Angelbird, Apacer, Avant Technology, BiTMICRO, Biwin, Dolphin, DDRdrive, EMC, Eonsil, Extreme Engineering, Foremay, Fusion-io, Huawei, IBM, Intel, KingSpec, LSI, Marvell, Memoright, Micron, Mushkin, NetApp, OCZ, Oracle, OWC, PhotoFast, QLogic, Ramaxel Technology, Renice Technology , RunCore, Samsung, SanDisk, SANRAD, Seagate, SMART, Sonnet Technologies, STEC, Super Talent , Texas Memory Systems, Violin Memory, Virident Systems. |
| PCIe SSD news below |
| Samsung enters PCIe SSD
market Editor:- June 17, 2013 - Samsung has entered the PCIe SSD market with an M.2 form factor model (80mm x 22mm) aimed at notebooks. Samsung's XP941 - which weighs less than 6g - has a sequential read performance of 1,400MB/s, and capacity up to 512GB. Editor's comments:- the SSD notebook market began the year before PCIe SSDs started being used in the enterprise. But in the first 5 years of its history (2006-2010) the notebook SSD market was a disappointment to SSD evangelists like me - because integration with PCs was so bad. And for years on these pages I ranted that notebooks using SSDs would never be able to reach their true potential as long as they were still wasting their inherently light CPU resources and latency advantages by talking to the CPU via old fashioned hard disk interfaces like SATA. The exciting thing about today's announcement by Samsung is that consumer grade PCIe SSDs for notebooks will enable a dramatically different user experience which will help to create new markets. Will there be a crossover into the enterprise market? It's inevitable that some people will ask - what would an array of consumer priced PCIe SSDs look like in a box? And no doubt you will probably see such products coming onto the market. And that might lead to a temporary state of user confusion about expectations for PCIe SSDs. But setting aside for the moment the obvious considerations at the single drive level of differences in endurance and performance characteristics - I think the key differentiators of enterprise PCIe SSDs compared to consumer PCIe SSDs are the different degree of data integrity (higher for the enterprise), power fail management and support for fault tolerance. Super Talent launches PCIe hybrid SSD Editor:- June 12, 2013 - Super Talent Technology today launched a new entry level (800MB/s) PCIe hybrid SSD which combines 192GB of flash with an integrated hard drive. The company says that their new Super Hybrid product line is "the solution for high performance storage at a low cost." Editor's comments:- As "price" is the sole reason why consumers would want to look at this product I was surprised it wasn't mentioned in the press release. I asked the question - and if I find out - I'll add a note here later. The word "enterprise" also appeared hopefully in Super Talent's blurb about this product. But saying so - doesn't make it so. Violin's new blog on PCIe vs FC SAN SSDs Editor:- June 11, 2013 - How much confidence do you have in the fault tolerance of the SSD system which you're deploying? - And how different are the reliability costs when you scale PCIe SSDs compared to rackmount SSDs? These are some of the issues discussed in a new blog by Violin - Flash Memory: too Array or to Card - written by the company's CTO of Software - Jonathan Goldick - who warns that when you're estimating the latency advantages between different ways of connecting SSDs - "Always be cognizant that you may just be moving the bottleneck to the software." ...read the article switching lanes in PCIe SSD supply Editor:- June 11, 2013 - How easy is it for server makers and storage oems to change their suppliers of PCIe SSDs? and - Why do they do it? These issues have been discussed in past articles and news stories - but as we're seeing more examples of it happening recently - more readers have been asking me about it - so I'll refresh this topic soon. But another - aspect of PCIe SSD supplier churn - which has received very little editorial coverage so far is the user experience. How hard is it for users to change enterprise PCIe SSD suppliers? Why do they do it? Given the pain of switching - are the benefits worthwhile? If you're a user who has gone through this - and is willing to say something about the subject - so your views and experience can be shared with readers in the context of a new article I'm working on - please email me Zsolt@StorageSearch.com with your comments. And knowing what you now know - I'm curious to know - Would you go through the same thing again? And is there anything else which you would like to say about this? Findings will be published in an article here on the mouse site in September. See also:- SSD market research exciting new directions in rackmount SSDs Editor:- May 29, 2013 - A new generation of enterprise SSD rackmounts is breaking all the rules which previously constrained price, performance and reliability. The new maths of this SSD box trend - what's behind it, where it's going, and some of the vendors driving it - are explored in my recent home page blog on StorageSearch.com - exciting new directions in rackmount SSDs. ...read the article we're #2 in PCIe SSDs and growing fast - says LSI Editor:- May 15, 2013 - LSI today announced it shipped over 40,000 PCIe SSDs in the past 12 months - and has been ranked the #2 merchant supplier of enterprise PCIe SSDs in the US, and the fastest growing in this category according to a recent report by Forward Insights. Fusion-io's founders resign Editor:- May 9, 2013 - Fusion-io recently announced that its co-founders - David Flynn (who had been CEO and President) and Rick White (who had been CMO) have resigned and will pursue future entrepreneurial investing activities together. ...more in SSD news OCZ gets award for Windows compatible SQL flash cache Editor:- May 8, 2013 - OCZ today announced that its ZD-XL SQL Accelerator earned the Best of Interop award in the data center and storage category. ZD-XL (unveiled at CeBIT last February) is a bundled package for Windows servers which includes an SQL optimized flash caching software appliance which leverages the low latency of an associated OCZ PCIe SSD card. Micron turns up the heat for adoption of 2.5" PCIe SSDs Editor:- May 3, 2013 - Micron yesterday announced it's sampling a new model in the hot swappable 2.5" PCIe SSDs market - the P420m has upto 1.4TB MLC capacity and can deliver 750K R IOPS. how will Memory Channel SSDs affect the PCIe SSD market? April 29, 2013 - StorageSearch.com today published a new article about the technical challenges and market opportunities posed by Memory Channel Storage SSDs which are being designed by SMART and Diablo Technologies. ...read the article Our PCIe SSD business is negligible today - says SanDisk's CEO Editor:- April 18, 2013 - Nearly all SanDisk's enterprise SSD revenue still comes from SAS SSDs - derived from their acquisition of Pliant in March 2011 - and the company's PCIe SSD revenue today is "negligibly small" but they see PCIe SSDs as a large market opportunity which they want to get into with products they will launch in the 2nd half the year. That was one of the messages from Sanjay Mehrotra, cofounder and CEO SanDisk - in the company's earnings conference call yesterday. ...read transcript on SeekingAlpha.com PCIe SSDs from Texas Memory Systems - haven't been retained in IBM's FlashSystems product lines Editor:- April 12, 2013 - 3 years ago I wrote a blog about the confusing nature of the "RamSan" brand of SSDs from Texas Memory Systems given that all the recent models in the family were in fact flash memory rather than RAM based - and furthermore some of the models didn't connect via an FC SAN but used PCIe instead. So it wasn't a surprise to see in yesterday's announcement by IBM (who acquired TMS last year) that the RamSan designation has been dropped in favor of the more accurate sounding "FlashSystem" in those models which migrated intact to IBM's enterprise flash product line. For example in the category of high availability rackmount SSDs - the old RamSan-720 (SLC) and RamSan-820 (MLC) have become the new IBM FlashSystem 720 and 820. But TMS's PCIe SSD models have been so fortunate.They aren't listed in IBM's range of PCIe SSDs (High IOPS Modular Adapters) which are instead based on products and technologies from Fusion-io and LSI. That no-show may be due to the fact that - unlike TMS's rackmount systems which were software agnostic - a lot more work is required to efficiently integrate server based SSDs into a wide range of server products. But I anticipate that TMS's big architecture SSD controller technology will resurface in future IBM SSD cards. QLogic launches FabricCache PCIe SSD Editor:- March 22, 2013 - QLogic yesterday entered the enterprise SSD market (in the PCI SSD and SSD ASAPs segments) with the launch its first product - the FabricCache 10000 Series adapter (pdf) - which provides transparent sharable and clusterable caching for FC SANs. The 2 card set (upto 400GB flash, and 2x 8Gbps FC ports) can deliver upto 310,000 initiator IOPS and supports upto 2,048 concurrent logins. Editor's comments:- for a lot more about this - see SSD news. new LSI blog on the value of enterprise PCIe SSDs Editor:- March 14, 2013 - You won't be surprised to see me mentioning a recently published blog by Robert Ober, System and Processor Architect, LSI - about the value of PCIe SSDs in big datacenters - which includes these statements:-
I prefer this alternative title - suggested by a banner graphic in the blog itself - An $8K PCIe card in an $4k server - huh!?! See also:- User Value Propositions for buying SSDs, SSD silos in the enterprise 9 million IOPS in a single PCIe SSD Editor:- March 5, 2013 - Fusion-io today announced it has achieved 9.6 million IOPS (64 byte) from a single 365GB MLC ioDrive2 (PCIe SSD). This performance is made possible using APIs in Fusion-io's ioMemory SDK (such as Auto-Commit Memory) which integrate flash into host systems, allowing data to bypass normal bottlenecks in the OS. FIO says its APIs have been embraced by dozens of industry-leading software companies to enhance their applications. EMC has new faster PCIe SSDs Editor:- March 5, 2013 - EMC today announced new models of PCIe SSDs which the company claims offer nearly 60% better TCO than (unnamed competitors) due to new levels of efficiency. EMC's XtremSF half - height, half - length PCIe SSDs are currently available in eMLC upto 2.2TB, while SLC models upto 1.4TB will ship in the 2nd quarter. EMC sources PCIe SSDs from various SSD companies:- Micron, LSI and Virident. Violin enters the PCIe SSD market Editor:- March 4, 2013 - Violin is entering the market for PCIe SSDs. Its new Velocity PCIe Memory Cards range have regular RAM caches and are available in 3 physical sizes.
This product gap would have been an important scoring factor in any potential company assessing Violin's value as an acquisition. It was one of several significant reasons why Texas Memory Systems (acquired by IBM) looked like a much more attractive acquisition candidate in the early part of last year than Violin - even though both companies had market-leading big controller SSD architectures - and despite Violin having sought acquisition much longer. Violin's lack of a PCIe SSD product line till now was a serious misjudgement of the opportunities for its technology in the enterprise SSD market and not due to any technical defficiencies. The company's first SSD racks launched in August 2007 (the Violin 1010 Memory Appliance) had - in fact - been launched with PCIe interfaces. How will Violin's late entry into the PCIe SSD card / module market impact competitors? The established leaders in this market space are:- Fusion-io, Texas Memory Systems, Virident and OCZ (and another 35 or so companies are listed on our PCIe SSD page). One more company in this market mix won't make any material difference to sales forecasts - even if that newcomer is Violin. Instead it will mean that the fuzzy edge of users' vendor shortlists will appear sharper - and companies which shouldn't have been in these lists in the first place will drop out. (But they wouldn't have been the ones who got the business anyway. There are a lot of different specialized types of PCIe SSDs - and just because they may look the same on the outside - doesn't mean they compete equally for the same apps slots.) My guess is that Violin's new products will be most attractive to companies which already like its rackmounts - and who were already looking for a more complete single supplier solution around which to hang their software. So I anticipate that customers in the big web economy and SSD dark matter users will predominate early demand for these new products. And - for any server companies which haven't yet acquired their own enterprise SSD IP - Violin (the company) will now look more attractive too. In a press release later today:- we learned that the final stimulus which nudged Violin tipping into the PCIe SSD market may have been:- hints, inducements and probably pressure from investor, memory supplier and wannabe-bigger-in-SSD partner - Toshiba. See also:- my classic article - if Fusion-io sells more - does that mean Violin will sell less? Virident betas remote PCIe SSD sharing Editor:- February 21, 2013 - Virident Systems recently announced beta availability of a new software suite - called FlashMAX Connect - which enables low latency shared server-side storage and high availability when used with the company's range of PCIe SSDs. New functionality includes:-
Editor's comments:- it's long been known within the SSD industry that these features have been in the pipeline - because they're based on support at the PCIe switch chip level. For an overview of this architecture enabling chip level support and how it offers flexibility in servers and SSDs - take a look at this video - PCIe in enterprise SSD designs by PLX. Sonnet launches bootable PCIe SSD for desktops Editor:- February 13, 2013 - Sonnet Technologies today launched a bootable PCIe SSD aimed at PCs and MACs. The Tempo PCIe SSD product is a nearly fast enough base card onto which users can install standard 2.5" SATA SSDs. PCIe everywhere? Editor:- February 1, 2013 - Is PCIe the Natural Next-Generation Data Center Fabric? That's what Larry Chisvin, VP of strategic initiatives PLX Technology believes and he'll try to convert you to his way of thinking next week at the Linley Tech Data Center Conference in Santa Clara. PLX is the worldwide market leader in PCIe switch products. See also:- enterprise SSD silos, PCIe SSDs, SSD glue chips. Diablo sets up compatibility team for new SSD interface Editor:- January 29, 2013 - Diablo Technologies today announced it has set a compatibility advisory team for its new SSD interface - which the company is apparently positioning as a faster alternative to PCIe SSDs. "As we prepare to launch our line of Memory Channel Storage products that enable next-generation enterprise server and storage system designs, we have set our sights on unprecedented levels of performance for current and future applications To that end, we have assembled a group of top industry innovators to help refine the development of our revolutionary NAND-flash system solutions..." said Diablo's CTO - Maher Amer. RunCore uses BiTMICRO controllers in fast PCIe SSDs Editor:- January 29, 2013 - today announced that RunCore will use BiTMICRO's Talino controllers in its new Kylin III MAX family (fast PCIe SSDs). Seagate turns to Virident for big SSD architecture Editor:- January 28, 2013 - Seagate today announced it has made a strategic equity investment in Virident as part of a new collaboration agreement which includes remarketing Virident's PCIe SSDs and working together to design new SSDs for the enterprise market. "Seagate is thrilled to team with Virident, a technology leader in one of the fastest growing markets in enterprise and cloud computing," said Gary Gentry, senior VP and GM, Solid State Drives at Seagate. "Together, we are working to develop the next-generation hardware and software solutions in the PCIe space." Editor's comments:- it was obvious a year ago that Seagate's earlier marriage of SSD IP convenience with LSI wasn't going to last long or remain monogamous - as LSI and Seagate would be competing for the same oem design slots in the enterprise market and furthermore LSI's small architecture SandForce controller isn't efficient for multi-petabyte scale fast SSD installations. (And in the consumer market LSI didn't have the adaptive controller IP - which led to Seagate's stake in DensBits) Virident - a top 10 SSD company - has a roadmap scalable big architecture enterprise SSD controller and drive family which has been developed in a cleanroom environment - where all the critical IP has been devleoped by the company. The obvious gap in the Seagate / Virident product line is a 2.5" removable PCIe SSD (to compete with Micron) - and it's a no brainer to see that Seagate's experience with this form factor - coupled with Virident's SSD design skills could quickly result in viable products for this new market - which will replace upto 25% of the projected market for fast SAS drives. STEC launches 2TB SAS SSD Editor:- January 28, 2013 - One of the oddest linking ideas I've ever seen in an SSD news story appeared today in a press release from STEC which suggests that anyone should care that the company is the first in the market to launch both a 2TB PCIe SSD ($9,425) and a 2TB SAS SSD ($7,995). Fusion-io positions ioScale for new SSD Dynasties Editor:- January 16, 2013 - Fusion-io has released a new PCIe SSD called the ioScale (3.2TB on a single half length PCIe slot) which is aimed at technically savvy customers who have the potential to use thousands of cards in their installations in new dynasty enterprise SSD apps. Pricing is under $3,900 / TB and the minimum order quantity is 100 units. Editor's comments:- When you first look at this product - you might be tempted to think - So what? - isn't it very similar in capability to other products which FIO (and others) have shipped already? In one way you'd be right. The ioScale's hardware design is based on FIO's experience in making low cost PCIe SSDs for the workstation market - which is as close to consumer market price pressure as FIO gets at the present time. But the ioScale is aimed at a special class of enterprise super users - whose apps and companies I call:- new dynasty and dark matter respectively. Rick White CMO Fusion-io told me that when they did market research into the kinds of customers who were already using their SSDs they discovered the big enterprise SSD customers could be segmented into 2 groups which superficially had similar performance needs - but were very different in the ways in which they valued issues such as:-
Fusion-io is one of the few companies in the world which already has a set of these latter cloud / data factory economy customers who each have already got thousands of high performance PCIe SSDs - and who have the ability to scale up substantially if their requirements are met and the SSD enabled economy grows in the directions expected. Rick told me that these customers do want scalable SSD performance, and low cost - but they don't need many of the bundled frills which are deemed to be necessary for traditional enterprise SSD customers When legacy apps report faulty drives they change the drive or the rack. When uber new dynasty SSD users report faults - they route around them. Then when the time comes to upgrade the CPU and storage capacity per square foot of that region in the datacenter - the whole lot is forklifted out and replaced - faulty and unfaulty racks - makes no difference. Also - in these apps - hot pluggable drives are a frill which is simply not worth paying for. The dark matter SSD customers - at which the ioScale is aimed - also know much more about the technical limitations of their infrastructure - and have the technical expertise to change things to suit them better - if they think it's worthwhile. So - for example - the ability to dive into SSD APIs and change their apps code to get speedups or other new functionality - is something they will do - whereas traditional enterprise customers prefer all new hardware to work with pre-existing software in a tweak-free environmoent. During my conversation with Rick White - I referred back to the ION software (which FIO launched in August 2012 - and which enables users to convert a standard server and a bunch of PCIe SSDs into a traditional SAN compatible rackmount SSD). My assessment of that product shared with readers at the time - was that if it satisfied the needs of a small number of super users - who could each buy maybe hundreds or thousands of such systems - that made it worthwhile for FIO to bundle the concept and launch it. I thought the analysis I had seen in other places - which compared it to traditional rack SSDs was completely missing the point. Rick confirned my analysis was closer to the mark - and many times in our discussion we returned to the problems in the SSD market caused by faulty and incomplete market research and mistaken understandings of what the real issues in the market were. My way of summarizing this is - that if you ask a bunch of people who go to a trade show - what do you think about SSDs? - you're going to get a different result to when you talk to people who are already deeply engaged in the SSD market, have already done a lot of SSD projects and who spend nearly all their waking hours thinking about what more can they do if they had even better SSDs? It's not that the traditional market research gives you the wrong answers - it's more that - if you're not in the right place in the SSD market then you don't understand enough to pose the right questions - and you probably don't have access to the people who will ultimately decide the answers. Fusion-io isn't the only SSD company who is getting value business insights by researching its strategic customers. I reported last year that SanDisk had adapted its approach to enterprise customers by deciding to support competing hardware with its FlashSoft software. And there are many more examples I could mention if I had the time. Virident's PCIe SSDs VMware Ready Editor:- January 14, 2013 - Virident Systems today announced that its FlashMAX II family (PCIe SSDs) has achieved VMware Ready status. See also:- Where are we now with SSD software?, SSD ASAPs BiTMICRO opens the door to Talino class SSD designs Editor:- January 8, 2013 - "Getting access to the Talino SSD controller will provide systems makers with similar raw performance to what they can get from integrating current industry standard PCIe SSDs but at lower cost and in a customizable physical footprint." ...read more in SSD controller news OCZ's newest new PCIe SSD Editor:- January 7, 2013 - OCZ already has several PCIe SSD families aimed at different markets. This week at CES the company will demonstrate another new range called the Vector series which is based on its Indilinx Barefoot 3 controller. Another comparison of 3 PCIe SSDs Editor:- January 3, 2013 - Performance comparisons between PCIe SSDs from OCZ, Micron and Intel were published recently in an article by Tom's Hardware . Editor's comments:- You may find it interesting or entertaining, although you know you should never attach too much weight to any single list of the fastest PCIe SSDs. An earlier part of the Tom's Hardware article - mentioned above - raised the subject of comparing the endurance in such SSDs to the cost expressed as dollars per petabytes written. In my view "$/PB written" is another one of those spurious metrics - like IOPS / $ (discussed in SSD news - December 5) which doesn't give you a reliable indicator about which product to select. If all you're interested in is "cost $/PB written" - then why not buy a hard drive? - because that's where this metric is pointing you. You know it's the wrong answer. It's the wrong metric and based on an incomplete understanding of what enterprise SSD users want. In an enterprise SSD context it's more important to look at whether you get the apps performance you want (rather than the benchmark performance), whether the product is reliable enough for your own needs - and whether it has scalability in performance and in the technology roadmap. Only after all those factors is it worthwhile comparing prices. enterprise SSD drives - $2.9 billion in 2012 Editor:- December 17, 2012 - I've lost track of how many new SSD reports and updates have been announced recently by Forward Insights - but one of them - SSD Insights Q4/12: Client Down, Enterprise Up - includes data and revenue forecasts for the enterprise SSD market. Author Gregory Wong told me that his estimate for enterprise SSD revenue in 2012 - which includes enterprise drives and modules (SAS, SATA and PCIe) but excludes rackmount systems and therefore also excludes proprietary SSDs built for use within racks from companies like Violin and Texas Memory Systems - is $2.9 billion. who are the ideal customers for BiTMICRO 's new (but late to market) Talino based maxIO PCIe SSDs? Editor:- December 12, 2012 - BiTMICRO today said it's begun manufacturing its pre-announced maxIO (PCIe SSDs) which use the company's Talino (means "talented", big architecture, SSD controllers). The first product in this range will be a full height, half-length 400K random IOPS (4KB), 4.5TB (eMLC) PCIe SSD....more in SSD news Virident ships FlashMAX II Editor:- November 28, 2012 -Virident Systems today announced the general availability and shipping of its previously unveiled FlashMAX II - (fast enterprise PCIe SSDs) which support Linux, Windows, and VMware ESXi and VDI environments. Pricing starts at $6,000. Diablo gets funding for alternative to PCIe SSDs Editor:- November 8, 2012 - as if 400 wasn't already enough - every week I hear about new SSD companies. One such - Diablo Technologies - today announced a $28 million funding round. Diablo's Memory Channel Storage - which will soon emerge from stealth - may not strictly be PCIe SSDs - but they will nevertheless affect users and vendors in this market. STEC does that Linux source driver thing for its PCIe SSD Editor:- October 29, 2012 - STEC today announced it's open sourcing the Linux driver for its fast PCIe SSD - the s1120. OCZ's new VXL software release includes fault tolerant support for arrays of PCIe SSDs Editor:- October 23, 2012 - OCZ today released a new version (1.2 ) of its VXL cache and virtualization software - which provides high availability, synchonous replication and enhanced VM performance across arrays of the company's Z-Drive R4 PCIe SSDs. 2.5" PCIe SSD - Dell talks to Micron Editor:- October 22, 2012 - Removable 2.5" PCIe SSDs are the subject of a new video today from Micron - which features Micron's Ed Doller and Dell's Brian Payne. IBM completes acquisition of TMS Editor:- October 1, 2012 - IBM today announced it has completed its acquisition of Texas Memory Systems. How will IBM's acquisition of TMS impact Fusion-io? Editor:- September 25, 2012 - some of you may be wondering - how will IBM's acquisition of Texas Memory Systems impact the pre-existing PCIe SSD business which IBM already does with Fusion-io? In general the 2 different types of PCIe SSD - TMS vs FIO - aren't the same and don't behave in the same way. In some situations there are strong arguments for users to prefer one product over another - and vice versa. Furthermore - the present SSD card incumbent in the IBM distribution store (Fusion-io) has some very sticky elements with respect to the performance benefits delivered by its software APIs - which can't be replicated by a substitute type of hardware product - no matter how fast its raw hardware. My gut feel, therefore is that as the enterprise SSD market is big enough to support both these 2 types of PCIe SSDs - it would be illogical from a business perspective for IBM to withdraw or downgrade the status of the Fusion-io product -so long as Fusion-io remains an independent company. In my view both product lines serve substantially different market roles well - and the degree of overlap and cannibalization is small. That's not to say that the TMS product line will be deployed in equal numbers. Far from it - I would expect the TMS architecture to be the biggest part of IBM's fast SSD business within a year of the acquisition - but that would be spread across a range of product deployments which includes rackmount SSDs (from the current TMS product line), and Ram-San PCIe SSDs and maybe removable 2.5" PCIe SSDs (as a future roll-out of TMS technology). Until IBM can develop or acquire software products for the TMS SSD cards - which are on a par with what FIO has to offer - then terminating the ioDrive options in its catalog would be equivalent to sending its server customers to competing server makers. The effect either way would be neutral for Fusion-io's business. Here are some of the related article links which I promised earlier.
RunCore launches fast PCIe SSD Editor:- September 24, 2012 - RunCore today launched its fastest yet PCIe SSD - the Kylin III PCIe - which has upto 1.4TB (usable) MLC capacity (full height, half length) R/W bandwith of 3GB/s and 2GB/s respectively - and R/W IOPS upto 700K / 500K (with 4KB blocks) and 3 / 1.4 million IOPS (512B). Read latency is 65µS (512B). Power consumption is under 15W (idle) and upto 50W (active). Editor's comments:- this new SSD from RunCore is in a different performance class to earlier generations from the company which were frankly nowhere near the best of breed in speed. Although PCIe SSDs is now a very crowded market - it gives buyers another viable (Top 20 SSD companies list) supplier to choose from. former BlueArc CEO, leaves HDS to steer Virident Editor:- September 20, 2012 - Confidence about the prospects for flash in the enterprise, and a firm conviction that Virident is a key player which will make a difference to the enterprise SSD market - set the tone of the conversation I had on Monday with the company's new CEO Mike Gustafson who was a few days into his new job and briefing me on Virident's announcement yesterday about his new appointment and the company's $26 million in Series D Funding. ...more in SSD news BiTMICRO's new TALINO based PCIe SSDs in Beta Editor:- September 12, 2012 - I noticed today that some new pages have appeared on BiTMICRO's website which unveil and outline a range - called maxIO - of enterprise SSDs (SATA, SAS and PCIe) which use the company's new TALINO SSD controller and hint at "100K to 400K IOPS (4KB) performance" - depending on which model you look at. The company is offering beta test samples to suitable people who sign an NDA. STEC will run PCIe SSD bootstorm demo at IDF Editor:- September 6, 2012 - STEC says it will demonstrate its new PCIe SSD - model 1120 does 55,000 random IOPS (70:30 R/W 8KB) - booting 100 virtual desktops in under 4 minutes - at next week's IDF in San Francisco. Editor's comments:- the VDI bootstorm demo path has already been well trodden by longer established PCIe SSD vendors such as Fusion-io and OCZ in the past year or so. (And by most serious rackmount SSD oems too.) This press release is another sign that that the born again (we really do want your business now) STEC wants to be recognized for what it can do in the enterprise - rather than simply tossing its SSD technology over the wall and hoping that its oem partners will pick some of it up. FlashMAX is FlashSoft compatible Editor:- August 27, 2012 - Virident's PCIe SSDs are supported by SanDisk's FlashSoft auto-caching software - it was announced today. The companies say this collaboration includes sales, joint testing and validation programs, and support and services assistance. Editor's comments:- the thinking behind SanDisk's strategic decision to support competing SSD hardware with its software was one of the things which I learned in a recent interview with the company (see SSD news August 15 for more details). enterprise SSD component drive trends - view from HGST Editor:- August 22, 2012 - Here's a short note from HGST's paper - enterprise interface trends paper (pdf) presented today at the Flash Memory Summit. "2 competing enterprise initiatives have emerged in the attempt to align the industry around PCIe based SSDs - SCSI express (led by HP) and NVMe (led by Intel and Dell). While a 3rd standard - SATA express - is aimed at clients and hybrids. In the 2.5" drive size - a multi-function bay can support both SAS and PCIe SSDs with the same SFF-8639 connector." HGST anticipates that in 2015 - over 5 million enterprise SSD drives will ship - evenly split between SATA, PCIe and SAS (incl FC). ...read the article (pdf) Texas Memory Systems to be acquired by IBM Editor:- August 16, 2012 - IBM today announced it will acquire Texas Memory Systems. The deal is expected to close later this year. Following acquisition close, IBM plans to invest in and support the TMS product portfolio, and will look to integrate over time TMS technologies into a variety of solutions. ...read more in SSD news Virident's new FlashMAX II Editor:- August 7, 2012 - Virident Systems today announced it will ship a new generation of fast PCIe SSDs in September. FlashMAX II (pdf) has upto 2.2TB usable RAID protected MLC capacity, 103K random R/W IOPS (4kB 70:30 mix), and 1.1 million random read IOPS (512B), and <80µS random read latency (4kB) in a ½ length, low profile form factor. Editor's comments:- I spoke to Shiva Shankar at Virident about the new product and the PCIe SSD market. Virident sees this type of SSD as heading towards a distinctly different storage tier - and that's the direction of their software focus - even though in the present market the products have been designed so they can drop in and work with legacy storage software and VMs with minimum fuss. From the design and marketing positioning point of view Virident has always placed great emphasis on application type symmetry and scalability symmetry. Shiva told me their performance scales linearly. That means if you have 8 PCIe slots and install upto 8 of the new FlashMAX modules - the available application performance will be Nx what you would predict from the single module results. Virident also say that their performance doesn't degrade significantly over the lifetime of the product. They call this "Infrastructure Predictability" - and say it's on the order of 1%. In contrast - the performance drop off in some competing enterprise flash SSDs can be more like 20% to 30%. (This is a vulnerability in some flash SSD designs which has also been mentioned by STEC - as an argument in favor of their CellCare technology. I asked Shiva if Virident uses adaptive DSP ECC techniques in its SSDs - and (as I expected) he said "no" (because it's a technique which has been deployed mostly to improve the cost of fast-enough enterprise SSDs (and components) - whereas Virident is in the fast end of the market spectrum. Virident specifically says that its new product is 2x as fast as a well known competitor. See also:- the 3 fastest flash PCIe SSDs the future of PCIe SSDs - series 6, episode 192 - will the Semicos take it all? Editor:- July 24, 2012 - You can see how an anticipated 45 second dialog with Texas Memory Systems about bootable PCIe SSDs turned into a 45 minutes discussion about the future of the PCIe SSD market in a new article extracted from the SSD news page today. ...read the article Proximal Data launches AutoCache for PCIe SSDs Editor:- July 23, 2012 - Proximal Data announced immediate availability of its first product - a software based SSD ASAP - designed to work with PCIe SSDs - in particular - products from LSI and Micron. AutoCache ($999 for cache sizes less than 500GB) reduces bottlenecks in virtualized servers to increase VM density, efficiency and performance. The company says it can increase VM density upto 3x with absolutely no impact on IT operations. Editor's comments:- here are some questions I asked about the new product - and the answers I got from Rich Pappas, Proximal's VP of sales and business development. Editor:- How long does it take for the algorithms to reach peak efficiency? Pappas:- It varies by workload, but typically it takes about 15 minutes for the cache to warm to reach peak efficiency. Editor:- Is the caching only on reads, or is it effective on writes too? Pappas:- AutoCache will only cache reads, but by virtue of relieving the backend datastore from read traffic, we have actually seen overall write performance improvements as well. This effect is also dependent on the workload. The Impact of DSP IP in PCIe SSDs etc Editor:- July 17, 2012 - among other things... the recently published editon of the Top SSD Companies includes a new competitive comparison of PCIe SSDs from STEC and Fusion-io - and suggests that the 12Gbps generation of SAS SSDs could be the last in the roadmap for SAS. ...read the article HA support in OCZ's PCIe SSD software Editor:- July 3, 2012 - OCZ published a white paper today - Accelerating MS SQL Server 2012 with OCZ Flash Virtualization (pdf) which describes the performance of the company's PCIe SSDs (Z-Drive R4) and its VXL caching and virtualization software in this kind of environment. The interesting angle (for me) was in the aspect of SSD fault tolerance rather than the 16x VM speedup. The paper's author Allon Cohen (who has written many thought provoking performance blogs) explains in this paper - "VXL software has a unique storage virtualization feature-set that enables transparent mirroring of SQL Server logs between 2 flash cards, thereby assuring that the log files can be accessed with ultra high performance, while at the same time, are highly available for recovery if required." ...read the article (pdf) Virident speeds up telco billing queries Editor:- June 19, 2012 - That legacy versus new dynasty thing as a way of viewing different SSD companies - is illustrated in a quote from a customer of Virident Systems - mentioned in a press release today. "We needed to eliminate the disk-drive bottleneck without changing the architecture of the billing system or the customer-care interface," said David Fruin, VP of engineering at Vail Systems - a conferencing technology services provider - which processes more than 48 million billing records a day on Microsoft SQL Server. Vail Systems improved their response times by an order of magnitude and more than doubled their ability to handle more customers by using Virident's FlashMAX PCIe SSDs to accelerate their systems "without requiring any other changes". Editor's comments:- "SSDs accelerate telco system" stories are as old as the hills. But what's interesting about this example from Virident is it shows that PCIe SSDs can do useful work in high availability environments which are usually regarded as the exclusive domain of SAN based SSDs. Those PCIe OR rackmount SSD use case distinctions aren't as rigid as some people think. Nutanix has a new NFS for PCIe SSD accelerated CPUs Editor:- June 12, 2012 - Nutanix today Nutanix announced the general availability of NDFS (Nutanix Distributed File System), a bold new distributed filesystem that has been optimized to leverage localized low latency PCIe SSDs such as those from Fusion-io. By shifting the NFS datapath away from the network directly onto the VMware vSphere host, NDFS bypasses network communications that have historically been fraught with multiple high-latency hops between top-of-rack and end-of-row switches. Nutanix accelerates both read and writes for any workload. Redundancy and availability are achieved by data mirroring across high-speed 10GbE switches. Nutanix says it harnesses the same distributed system techniques that power webscale clouds such as Google, Amazon, and LinkedIn clouds into an enterprise-friendly package that starts out as a high-density 2U datacenter rack. Editor's comments:- Nutanix is in the SSD ASAP market - with CPU-SSD equivalency architecture integrated in the OS. The company says their architecture "collapses compute and storage into a single tier." You can get the general idea from their blog and video. SanDisk launches Lightning PCIe SSDs Editor:- June 5, 2012 - SanDisk today launched a new family of bootable enterprise PCIe SSDs with upto 400GB (MLC) capacity ($2,350 MSRP) - the Lightning - which leverages SSD IP from 2 previously acquired companies (Pliant for the controller hardware and FlashSoft for the auto caching software). Upto 5 cards can be installed in a single system. Editor's comments:- no useful performance data about the new products was available on the Lightning PCIe SSD home page when I looked - so you'll just have to imagine how fast an SSD with that type of name might be. Biwin enters PCIe SSD market Editor:- June 4, 2012 - Biwin is showing a (slow) prototype PCIe SSD at Computex 2012. The company says this isn't a marketable product but signals its intention to enter the PCIe SSD market soon with products which are closer to the 8GB/s potential thoughput of 3rd generation PCIe servers. KingSpec enters the PCIe SSD market Editor:- May 25, 2012 - KingSpec will show its first PCIe SSD in 2 weeks time at Computex 2012 in Taipei. If you measure the start of the PCIe SSDs market by when volume customer shipments began - then 2012 is the 6th year of this market. But instead of seeing market consolidation the huge demand for PCIe SSDs means that more vendors then ever before are entering this market - and offering a range of bewilderingly different concepts about exact functionality, performance and cost. 2.5" PCIe SSDs guide Editor:- May 21, 2012 - StorageSearch.com today published a new article introducing the market for 2.5" PCIe SSDs . Although some aspects of this new market are predictable - if you're already familiar with PCIe SSDs and SAS SSDs - the new SSD delivery package also opens up new possibilities which can sit above and below pre-existing 2.5"SSDs in price as well as performance. And the new 2.5" PCIe SSDs will also introduce and showcase new types of functionality which haven't been been feasible before at the SSD drive level. ...read the article |
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