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 | |
|
