the SSD Buyers Guide - click to see article
SSD buyers guide
the fastest SSDs - click to read article
the fastest SSDs
top 10 SSD oems
top 10 SSD oems

storagesearch.com

storage search
11 years - "leading the way to the new storage frontier"

click for more info about the RamSan-620 Flash Solid State Disk
RamSan-620
5 terabytes low cost SLC flash SSD
from Texas Memory Systems
.

rackmount SSDs

the Fastest SSDs
Why I Tire of "Tier Zero Storage"
RAM Cache Ratios in flash SSDs
the Top 10 Solid State Disk Companies
Are MLC SSDs Safe in Enterprise Apps?
Data Integrity Challenges in flash SSD Design
Market Trends in the Rackmount SSD Market
RAM SSDs versus Flash SSDs - which is Best?
.
Sir Squeaks-a-Bit If he had his way... Sir
Squeaks-a-Bit would
stretch all 15K RPM disk
pretenders on the rack and
remove their wobbly heads.
rackmount SSDs
rackmount SSD news network storage ad click for more info
Avere Adds SLC SSD Options to 2U ASAPs

Editor:- January 26, 2010 - Avere Systems today announced it's shipping new SLC flash SSD options in its FXT Series 10GbE NAS compatible SSD ASAPs.

The 2U Avere FXT 2700 appliance (from $82,500) features 64GB of DRAM, 1GB of NVRAM, and 512GB of SLC flash SSD. FXT clusters can scale to 25 appliances and support millions of operations/sec and tens of GB/sec throughput.

“One of the main assumptions of Demand-Driven Storage is that data access requirements are different across applications,” said Ron Bianchini, President and CEO of Avere Systems. “Applications that produce heavy random read workloads are best addressed by SSDs and the FXT 2700 is Avere’s answer for those users who have a high-end NAS infrastructure that under delivers when it comes to these types of applications.”


2010 - 1st Fizz in the SSD Market Bubble

Editor:- January 14, 2010 - StorageSearch.com recently published a new article - 2010 - 1st Fizz in the SSD Bubble.

I think SSD analysts will look back on 2010 as - "Year 1 of the SSD Market Bubble." Greed will play as big a part as technology in shaping the SSD year ahead. Wonder why? ...read the article


Need SSD Acceleration ASAP? - new article on SSD ASAPs

Editor:- December 18, 2009 - StorageSearch.com today published a new article which discusses the pros and cons of using SSD ASAPs - Auto-tuning SSD Accelerated Pools of storage.

How can server users easily decide if they should ignore these products - or spend more time looking at them? It's going to be a huge market. ...read the article


EMC Casts SSD Divining Rod into Hard Disk Arrays

Editor:- December 8, 2009 - EMC today published a report on its new fully automated storage tiering concept which the company says will simplify user operations needed to optimize storage allocation between hard drives and SSDs within the company's arrays.

The company says some of this functionality is now available on some models.

Editor's comments:- although better than nothing - adding a software manager retrospectively to storage arrays which were never designed for SSDs in the 1st place can never deliver as much performance as a true native ASAP SSD appliance (where some of the support is built into the hardware) - and nowhere near as much performance as the fastest SSDs (EMC has never been in this list) when optimized by human SSD hot shots.

In order to get the full benefits of the SSD acceleration paradigm EMC will need to dump its legacy storage array designs and start offering boxes which have been designed from the outset to support large amounts of PCIe SSD capacity. Without that - its systems will remain moderate performers at immoderate prices.

To put it another way - bolting SSD tiering onto controllers designed for hard drives is like trying to do air traffic control by having a traffic cop standing on the ground and waving his stick. You can make the stick a brighter color and give the pilot stronger glasses - but it's not going to give you the traffic movements you get from integrated avionics.


NextIO Opens Next Phase in PCIe SSD Market

Editor:- November 10, 2009 - NextIO has entered the multi-million IOPS rackmount SSD market via an oem agreement which leverages multiple 225GB / 450GB PCIe SLC SSDs made by Texas Memory Systems.

Available immediately, the 14 slot NextIO application acceleration appliance can be configured and reconfigured with any mix of servers and TMS SSD cards depending on system demands. Pricing for a basic configuration starts at $19,500, which includes implementation, training and onsite application or database tuning assistance.

NextIO will demonstrate a bundled storage appliance utilizing 8 or more TMS RamSan-10 PCIe SSD cards performing at 1.2M IOPs or greater next week at SC09 .

Woody Hutsell, President, Texas Memory Systems said - "Just a few months ago we announced a record-breaking 5 million IOPS in a 40U rack and now with a joint solution from NextIO, customers can realize over 15M IOPs in the same datacenter footprint. This partnership with NextIO provides our customers with a quantum leap in scalable performance by simply combining these 2 world-class technologies."

Editor's comments:- in a little over 2 years the PCIe SSD market first captured the imagination of server architects worldwide and then moved off the page into the datacenter overtaking 2.5" SSDs in blueprints for future enterprise class servers.

Today's announcement is significant. You may ask why? Haven't all the elements in this product mix been available for some while? In some ways that's true:- rackmount PCIe connected SSDs have been shipping since August 2007 (Violin Memory) and very fast PCIe SSDs cards for adding into server slots since March 2008 (Fusion-io), and rackmount SSDs based on multiple PCIe cards since March 2009 (Dolphin). But to my knowledge Dolphin's solution is not available as an unbundled card.

The new thing about today's announcement is it's the 1st time that an already market proven PCIe SSD card from one oem has also been offered in a supported (Dolphin style) rack product from another. That considerably reduces the risk for users - and provides an incremental upgrade path for users who aren't yet in a position to commit to multi-terabyte proprietary rackmount SSDs. For more discussion of open versus proprietary rackmount SSDs see - Market Trends in the Rackmount SSD Market


ASAPs Webinar

Editor:- November 10, 2009 - Dataram is running a webinar next week (November 18) - Navigating the Maze of Solid State Storage Solutions.

The company says viewers will discover - "How to better gauge your storage traffic to identify bottlenecks and areas where solid state storage can provide a day 1 positive ROI."

Editor's comments:- as I said earlier - StorageSearch.com will soon publish a new guide to ASAPs (Auto-tuning SSD Accelerated Pools of storage) - and I'm rounding up content and comments on this subject. But the webinar, above, takes place before our new guide will be published.


Adaptec Publishes Naively Designed SSD Benchmark

Editor:- November 3, 2009 - Adaptec today released the results of 3rd party performance testing of its new MaxIQ SSD Cache Performance Solution in MySQL environments.

AppLabs evaluated the performance of MaxIQ in its MySQL Testing Environment (which assumed 95% reads and 5% writes) and found that read and write throughput increased 8x with MaxIQ SSD cache enabled. Transactions per second improved 6.9x going from 346 tps with SSD cache disabled to 2,374 tps with SSD cache enabled.

Editor's comments:- I was underwhelmed by these results compared to fast SSD accelerated environments - but I suppose Adaptec's thinking is that it shows worthwhile speedup results using cheap affordable Intel SSDs - and without needing expensive SSD hot-shot tuning.

Like all such tests - the setup has elements of unreality about it.

In real-life you wouldn't use Adaptec's product to sit between an 80GB database and a 32GB flash SSD. Instead you'd put all the data into SSD. And it would give you better results than using Adaptec's middle-ware.

In deployments with larger databases - a more typical HDD to SSD ratio (based on economic constraints) might be closer to 10 to 1 rather than 3 to 1.


Another SPC-1 Record for TMS SSD

Editor:- October 27, 2009 - Texas Memory Systems today announced that its RamSan-620 - (2U 5TB SLC flash SSD, price $220,000 approx) - has achieved a record setting SPC-1 result.

It produced 254,994.21 SPC-1 IOPS with average response time of 0.72mS and at a cost of only $1.13 per SPC-1 IOPS - which is better than any competing RAID or Flash solution.

"We are delighted that the RamSan-620 has joined our RamSan-400 and RamSan-320 to create a dream team of SSDs that is setting the standard for performance and value as verified by SPC-1," said Woody Hutsell, President of Texas Memory Systems. "Our proprietary Zero Quest technology is deployed across both our DRAM and Flash products to ensure that our latency remains the best in the market. This translates into sustained application acceleration and unrivalled value for our customers."

Dedupe Makes SSD Appliances Affordable - says WhipTail's CTO
Editor:- October 12, 2009 - WhipTail Technologies became the 1st SSD appliance company to market integrated in-line deduplication.

At SNW WhipTail announced it will ship its newly renamed Racerunner (6TB) NAS SSDs with Exar's Hifn BitWackr deduplication and compression solution in Q4 2009. Racerunner has demonstrated deduplication performance in excess of 1Gbps.

James Candelaria, CTO of WhipTail Technologies said "Once again, we're proving Tier 0 storage doesn't have to be expensive. By providing in-line de-duplication, customers can save money by investing only in the storage they need."


Avere Launches Hybrid NAS SSD Rackmounts

Editor:- October 5, 2009 - Avere Systems unveiled its FXT Series of clusterable 2U rackmount hybrid NAS appliances.

Each module contains upto 8x 3.5" SAS hard drives, 64GB DRAM and 1GB of nv RAM. The embedded Avere OS provides storage acceleration by dynamically tiering between the internal rotating and solid state storage. List pricing starts at $52,500.

"The FXT Series is a milestone in the evolution of storage products with its dynamic use of storage media to maximize speed while minimizing cost," said Ron Bianchini, co-founder and CEO of Avere Systems. "The end-result is a product line that can deliver tremendous business value to customers by providing high performance and high efficiency to the storage network simultaneously."

Editor's comments:- Avere is the 3rd company in recent weeks to announce an automatic solution for the age old problem of accelerating legacy hard disk array applications with solid state storage. There are some interesting differences in approach and target markets.

Avere's product is aimed at NAS systems. It's a complete end user solution which includes the hard disks which are to be accelerated. Avere says the new product can be configured with upto 1.6TB of DRAM per cluster.

Dataram's product is aimed at SAN systems. It's an end user upgrade solution which fits between the customer's FC switch and pre-existing SAN rotating storage arrays. In some cases where users have already over provisioned hard disks - the XcelaSAN may also, as a side effect, increase the usable storage capacity as well as speed up the apps.

Adaptec's product is aimed at DAS systems. The MaxIQ SSD Cache Performance Kit an integrator / oem solution which simplifies the task of building a hybrid storage pool.

Key questions for customers are going to be:- Does it work? How does the price / performance compare to vanilla SSDs and human tuning? And how reliable are the new products going to be? Understanding the failure modes in large SSD arrays is not something that traditional storage designers know very much about.


Dataram Eliminates Waits for the SSD Hot Shot / Hot Spot Engineer

Editor:- September 28, 2009 - Dataram launched the XcelaSAN - a fast 2U rackmount flash SSD with 450,000 random IOPS performance (assuming 50/50 R/W and 4k blocks), and upto 8x 4Gbps FC ports - aimed at the SAN application acceleration market. Pricing starts at $65,000 for a unit with approx 360GB internal flash, of which 128GB is effectively used as a cache.

"It is now well understood that the benefit of a solid state infrastructure for compute-intensive environments is higher application performance with less equipment and lower operational costs," said Jason Caulkins, Dataram Chief Technologist. "The question is no longer 'How can I benefit from solid state storage?' but 'How do I best implement solid state in my existing infrastructure?' With XcelaSAN, we enable organizations with performance intensive applications to seamlessly add a dynamic, intelligent solid state storage tier to their existing SAN environment."

Editor's comments:- At 1st glance this product looks like many others which have aimed at the traditional market of SAN users. But its revolutionary design opens a new market which has been inaccessible to traditional FC SSD vendors. Dataram's product includes proprietary software - which does away with the need for an SSD expert engineer to identify hotspots and relocate critical data. The company says the XcelaSAN will automatically learn and self optimize during the 1st few hours of operation - and it will maintain application speedups even when applications and loads change - which is not possible with human tuned systems.

The search for a self tuning agnostic SSD software layer which sits between a SAN server and conventional rotating disk bulk storage has been the Holy Grail of SSD oems for over a decade. None have actually achieved it - till now. Although many vendors have developed semi-automated tuning kits and strategies for common applications - they require considerable expertise on the part of the applications engineer to make them work well. That has slowed down the adoption rate of SSDs in many midsized organizations which don't have a big enough installed base to attract the start SSD talent to look at their problems. And it's also why SSD accelerators, have not been viable as a reseller product.

When I spoke to Dataram's CTO, Jason Caulkins, I was impressed by the depth of marketing thinking behind the new product launch.

Dataram realized that simply launching a me-too SSD box would have an uncertain outcome in a market that's already so crowded. And Dataram's corporate memory goes back over 30 years to pioneering SSDs for minicomputers which they launched in 1976. But all memory companies know that in the future SSDs will use more memory than traditional markets - such as server or pc motherboards. So it's important to stake out ground in the SSD market.

I asked - where did the technology come from? Jason said some of it came from Dataram's acquisition of Cenatek - where he had already been thinking about the SSD business model problem for many years. With much bigger resources available after Dataram's acquisition - he's had teams of software engineers working on the XcelaSAN concepts and licensed essential glue where needed.

Will it work? Dataram says the XcelaSAN has been tested and working in customer sites. Product shipments in the US start in the next quarter. And the product is storage agnostic - meaning the customer can replace their SAN arrays at a future date and retain the acceleration speedup. XcelaSAN seems to offer a viable route for mid-budget user enterprises - who have been neglected by SSD vendors for economic reasons - to join the march of the SSD Revolution.

Is it competitive? - If you use my quick and dirty magic number for SSD sever accelerators - (write IOPS divided by cost per TB) - it's in the same order of magnitude as leading PCIe SLC flash SSD cards - so it's definitely worth a look.


Texas Memory Systems Shows 100 terabyte SSD at SIGGRAPH

Editor:- August 5, 2009 - Texas Memory Systems launched the RamSan-6200 a 40U rackmount SSD with 100TB of SLC flash storage, 5 million IOPS performance and upto 60GB/s throughput - which uses approximately 6kW of power.

Initially designed to meet the specific requirements of a customer with extreme performance needs, it combines 20x RamSan-620s in a single datacenter rack and uses TMS' TeraWatch software to provide unified management and monitoring from a single GUI console.

TMS is showing the new SSD this week at SIGGRAPH 2009 in New Orleans.


6TB Tier 0 SSD in 2U from WhipTail

Editor:- July 8, 2009 - WhipTail Technologies today announced a 6TB version of its 2U SSD appliance.

WhipTail's CEO, Ed Rebholz said "One of Tier 0 storage's downfalls to date has been the perception within the industry that it's too expensive. Since WhipTail's introduction earlier this year, we've already made significant strides in helping our industry peers to gain a new perspective. And in introducing the 6TB capacity, not only is WhipTail setting the bar for performance, footprint and affordability, but now we're the SSD capacity leader."

Editor's comments:- it's certainly the highest density server acceleration SSD I'm aware of. But you should be aware that the internal flash is MLC (and not SLC) which is a bird of a different feather. The memory type wasn't stated in the original text of the press release.

A company spokesperson assured me that WhipTail manages the write cycle to ensure that the MLC disks last a minimum of 7 years when under load.

Other competing 2U SSDs in this capacity range include:- the RamSan-620 a 5TB SLC flash SSD from Texas Memory Systems and the Violin 1010 a 4TB SLC flash SSD from Violin Memory.


91% of Compellent's Customers Want to Evaluate SSDs

Editor:- June 17 , 2009 Compellent today announced results generated through attendee polling conducted at its annual customer conference.

91% of business partners and 78% of customers responded important, very important or critical when asked, "What is your level of interest in evaluating SSDs in your environment?"


Sun Responds to User Needs for More SSD Capacity

Editor:- May 27, 2009 - Sun Microsystems announced today it has improved its hybrid rackmount storage systems to support an additional 600GB of flash SSD cache (compared to the current 64GB internal limit) for enhanced application performance.

The Sun Storage 7310 is available today and starts at a price of $40,165.

Editor's comments:- terabyte SSDs become commercially available in 2002 - so Sun's initial product offering last November - which supported a mere 36GB per 4U rack - was a sure sign that the company either didn't know what it was doing - or was being overly cautious.

There are plenty of rackmount SSD vendors in the market - and soon there will be hundreds more. There's wide diversity in product architectures (open versus proprietary) and applications experience in this part of the SSD market (ranging from months in the case of Sun - to more than a decade for companies like Solid Data Systems and Texas Memory Systems).

If you are thinking of buying an SSD from Sun - timing the purchase is a something to think about. In recent years Sun used to steeply discount towards the end of its quarter. I'm not sure how being part of Oracle will affect that. See also:- Hybrid Storage Drives


Dolphin's New StorExpress SSD Ships in May

Editor:- April 21, 2009 - MAGMA and Dolphin jointly announced they have collaborated to develop an improved version of the latter's previously announced StorExpress (2U rackmount PCIe connected SSD product line) which will ship next month.

Capacity options include 0.5TB (under $20K), 1TB and 2TB. It achieves 270K read and write IOPs (512 bytes to 4KB blocks) and up to 2.8GB/s of sustained bandwidth. Latency is less than 50µS. The StorExpress enclosure can be positioned 1,000 feet away from the host server using fiber.

"PCI Express, with its tight linkages to microprocessors is the natural technology for creating high performance systems" said Tim Miller, CEO Dolphin. "By partnering with Magma we have created an exceptional solution - simple, elegant, cost effective yet capable of delivering world class performance and flexibility."


Winchester Systems Unveils Rugged Rackmount SSD RAID

Editor:- March 5, 2009 - Winchester Systems says its will launch a range of rugged rackmount SSDs next week at FOSE .

Among the new products is a 1U RAID 5 / 6 protected rugged SSD array - the RX-1300 FlashDisk - which houses 12x 2.5" SSDs. Interface options for the array include SAS, FC and PCIe.

"Customers find that they need field deployable storage and servers that exceed standard commercial capabilities but not full military rugged specifications or prices," explained Mr. Joel Leider, the company's CEO. "Our rugged storage and servers provide extra security and protection against dust, rain, shock and vibration at COTS prices which are about half of full military standard costs."

The US Army has approved these units for field use. They are deployed in harsh environments worldwide in HUMVEEs and stationary shelters. FlashDisk RX disk arrays feature RAID 6 dual parity so even if 2 disk drives fail or become unreadable, the data will remain intact. See also:- Military & Rugged Storage.


Nimbus Offers Drive Agnostic NAS

San Francisco, CA - February 9, 2009 - Nimbus Data Systems today announced the H-class RH100 quad port 10GbE unified storage system.

It offers up to 60x hot-swappable SATA (terabyte HDDs supported), SAS (450GB HDDs), or SSD drives (7.7TB capacity if populated by supported 128GB SSDs). Drives can be mixed within the same enclosure. The RH100 includes no-additional-charge snapshot, cloning, and replication software, built-in iSCSI SAN and NAS capabilities. The RH100 has a 4GB cache and 60Gbps internal bandwidth. Nimbus says it can be up and running in just 20 minutes. ...Nimbus profile


NetApp Starts Walking the SSD Talk

Sunnyvale, Calif. - February 3, 2009 - NetApp unveiled 2 strands in its solid state storage acceleration strategy today - support for Texas Memory Systems' RamSan-500 flash SSD array and also a new Performance Acceleration Module.

Support for the 100K IOPS RamSan-500 SSD is supplied by NetApp's V-Series storage controller and Data ONTAP software. The RamSan-500 can be utilized as a large, fast networked cache, or otherwise partitioned to maximize storage efficiency.

Meanwhile - the new PAM provides a read cache (16GB to 80GB) implemented by PCI Express DRAM cards. These enables NetApp customers to significantly increase application performance in FC disk arrays by 35% using 1/2 the number of hard disks typically used in over-provisioned HDD arrays. Alternatively customers can deploy lower cost, higher density SATA HDDs instead of FC disks while still maintaining performance and making substantial savings in costs. ...Network Appliance profile, ...Texas Memory Systems profile

Editor's comments:-
better late than never - NetApp's announcements today make it easier and less risky for their customers to feel comfortable in following a long established trend to accelerate network applications performance with SSDs while reducing overall systems costs

Although NetApp's PAM is a PCIe RAM card and not a PCIe flash SSD - it's just a short walk from one to the other. I have little doubt the company has already been evaluating options in this market space..


RAID Inc Launches 1U Rackmount SSD

Methuen, MA - January 27, 2009 - RAID Inc. announced the availability of its new 1U SSD RAID.

The Razor SSD is a 12 bay 4 port fibre-channel system using COTS 2.5" SAS SSDs in a RAID protected array. The Razor comes with RAID's patent pending StorageWatch service - which proactively monitors storage conditions in real-time. ...RAID Inc profile, rackmount SSDs
click to read article:- SSD Market History
click for more info about the revolutionary auto tuning XcelaSAN SSD accelerator from Dataram
XcelaSAN is a "revolutionary" self optimizing
2U enterprise SSD accelerator
from Dataram

Easyco enterprise flash SSD 1U, 2U or 3U silver or black
1U, 2U, 3U enterprise flash SSDs
MFT accelerated appliances
from EasyCo

4U 100,000 IOPs 2 terabyte flash SSD from TMS
RamSan-500 - 2 terabytes flash SSD
2 gigabytes / sec sustained storage throughput
from Texas Memory Systems

Fusion-io fast SSDs - click for more info
world's fastest production PCIe SSD
from Fusion-io

Universal Solid State Disk USSD 200 from Solid Access Technologies with SAS, FC, SCSI or custom interfaces
performance/price leading
SAS, FC & SCSI enterprise solid state disks
from Solid Access Technologies
.
rackmount SSD OEMs
Asine

Attorn

Avere Systems

BiTMICRO Networks

Compellent

Concurrent Computer

Coraid

Curtis

Dataram

Dell

Dolphin

EasyCo

EMC

Fuji Xerox

Gear6

Hitachi Data Systems

Network Appliance

NextIO

Nimbus Data Systems

Panasas

Pillar Data Systems

Rackable Systems

RAID

RunCore

SeaChange International

SEEK Systems

Solid Access Technologies

Solid Data Systems

Storspeed

Sun Microsystems

Superior Data Solutions

Taejin Infotech

Texas Memory Systems

Third I/O

TiGi

Vanguard Rugged Storage

Verari Systems

Violin Memory

ViON

WhipTail Technologies

Winchester Systems
.
disk
Hard disk drives

InfiniBand
InfiniBand

Flash Memory
Flash Memory

serial SCSI
Serial Attached SCSI

RAM
RAM

Military storage
Military STORAGE

storage search banner

1.0" SSDs 1.8" SSDs 2.5" SSDs 3.5" SSDs rackmount SSDs PCIe SSDs SATA SSDs
SSDs all flash SSDs hybrid drives flash memory RAM SSDs SAS SSDs Fibre-Channel SSDs

StorageSearch.com is published by ACSL