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| rackmount SSD news |
New
Models from Solid Access Technologies
Newburyport,
Mass - May 6, 2008 - Solid Access Technologies today announced higher
capacity models in its 2U rackmount line of RAM SSDs.
The
128GB model (price $75,000) is shipping now. The 256GB models will ship next
month. Both models are part of the USSD 200 product line - which dramatically
increases server efficiency by recovering CPU cycles formally lost in I/O wait
cycles. They deliver random read/write performance of 95,000 IOPS using a single
Fibre Channel link and over 70,000 IOPS using SAS. Access time is under 10
microseconds
"For applications facing critical performance
demands that can't be serviced by decades old spindle-based storage, ultra-fast
SSD is emerging as a weapon of choice to improve lagging storage speed,"
said Solid Access Managing Partner, Tomas Havrda. ...Solid Access
Technologies profile
Texas Memory Systems Celebrates 30 Years Making SSDs
HOUSTON, TEXAS - April 2, 2008 -
Texas Memory Systems today announced that it is celebrating its 30th
year in business.
The company was founded in 1978 to supply high
performance computer memory products to the energy industry. 30 years later,
Texas Memory Systems is the leading manufacturer of
rackmount SSDs
for business enterprises.
"Many companies have come and gone in the
SSD business
over the last 30 years, so it's not surprising that enterprises take a
supplier's longevity into account when considering technology partners.
Companies need strategic relationships with vendors that are in it for the long
haul," said Mike Karp, senior analyst and storage practice leader at
Enterprise Management Associates.
Since 1978, the cost of a gigabyte
of RAM SSD has
dropped from $1 million down to $500 and the past 30 years have seen marked
changes in price, performance, and usage of
SSDs.
In 1978,
Texas Memory Systems introduced a 16 kilobyte RAM-based solid state disk system
designed to accelerate field seismic data acquisition for oil companies. Oil
prices dropped to $8 a barrel in the 1980s resulting in a steep drop in industry
spending encouraging TMS to expand its reach into Government sectors with
digital signal processors that incorporated solid state disk to boost
performance.
Advances in computing power, and the expansion of the digital economy
have driven increased demand by enterprise applications for high performance
storage. Because of this shift,
in
2000, TMS introduced the RamSan line of solid state disk systems to
accelerate commercial applications for the Enterprise.
Today, RamSan systems
are the dominant enterprise solid state disk used by major financial exchanges,
banks, e-commerce and telecommunications firms across the world. The company's
solid state disk business has averaged over 40% growth per year for each of the
last 3 years. ...Texas
Memory Systems profile
SeaChange Eliminates Spinning Disks in the
On-air Chain
March
3, 2008 – SeaChange International today introduced its
Broadcast Flash Memory Library FML200, a flash memory-based ingest and
play-to-air solution that sets a new benchmark in reliability and economy.
With no moving parts, the breakthrough server is 100x more reliable and consumes
10x less power than spinning disk-based counterparts, greatly mitigating
failures, rebuilds, replacements and other disk-related threats. The system can
eliminate spinning disks in the on-air chain and is immediately available for
television operators worldwide. SeaChange will demonstrate the FML200 at
NAB2008 in April.
...SeaChange
International profile
Are MLC SSDs Ever Safe in Enterprise
Apps?
Editor:-
February 27, 2008 - STORAGEsearch.com published a new article today
called - Are MLC SSDs Ever Safe in Enterprise Apps?
This is a
follow up article to the popular
SSD Myths and
Legends which, in early 2007, demolished the myth that flash memory
wear-out (a comfort blanket beloved by many
RAM SSD makers)
precluded the use of flash in heavy duty datacenters.
This new
article looks at the risks posed by MLC Nand Flash SSDs which have recently
hatched from their breeeding ground as chip modules in cellphones and morphed
into hard disk form
factors. It starts down a familiar lane but an unexpected technology twist
(which arrived in my email this morning) takes you to a startling new world of
possibilities. ...read the article
Free Tool Unveils SSD Fast Lane for
Oracle DBAs
Houston,
Texas - February 27, 2008 - Texas Memory Systems today announced
availability of version 2.0 of StatspackAnalyzer.com.
This is a
freely available online tool that analyzes the data from a user's own
Oracle reports and
presents clear, customized
recommendations for
improving performance. In just 1 year, over 10,000 Oracle DBAs and consultants
have become registered users and hundreds have offered to help improve the
features. Version 2.0 has been updated to support Oracle from version 8 to 11.1
"StatspackAnalyzer.com is quickly emerging as the go-to resource
for Oracle DBAs who are trying to improve their database performance," said
Don Burleson, CEO of
Burleson Consulting, author of
numerous books on Oracle database performance tuning and a sponsor of the
StatspackAnalyzer.com initiative. "DBAs email us regularly to say how it is
helping them understand the issues that are affecting their database
performance, and providing helpful recommendations. We are also getting great
feedback that is helping us to keep evolving the tool, and improving its
usefulness to the Oracle community." ...sign up for free copy,
...Texas Memory Systems
profile
Editor's comments:- tools which help users see clear
opportunities for application speedup are a good thing. The sample report I saw
only refers to the sponsor's own SSD material (and they do make the fastest
storage in many form factors). But you can always come
back here to
compare other SSD price /
performance options too.
Introducing Another Enterprise SSD Player
- Pliant Technology
Milpitas, Calif -
February 19, 2008 - Pliant Technology today announced that it has
received $8 million in Series A funding to drive the development of SSD storage
devices for enterprise computing markets.
Pliant's new
Enterprise Flash Drive devices are being designed to deliver dramatically
higher levels of performance while meeting the growing need for increased energy
efficiency and reliability
in enterprise computing environments.
Pliant Technology was formed by
several of the foremost experts and innovators in the data storage industry
including:- Jim McCoy (co-founder of
Maxtor and
Quantum), Amyl Ahola
(former CEO of
TeraStor
and Mike Chenery (former VP of advanced product engineering at
Fujitsu). Pliant's
solution is expected to be available to OEM and data center customers in the 4th
quarter of 2008.
...Pliant Technology
profile, rackmount
SSDs
Editor's comments:- over 20 oems currently make products
for what Pliant calls the "new" enterprise SSD market. This will be as
big a market in revenue as the consumer notebook SSD market - but with (mostly)
different players.
Some of Pliant's founders have worked together
before on the same concept (replacing hard drives) at
TeraStor
which went through more than $85 million in the 1990s working on an
unsuccessful optical storage technology. Computer architecture, applications
experience and marketing are the key factors needed to make a successful
enterprise SSD business today. There are plenty of companies who will sell you
cheap memory chips. The enterprise SSD market in 2009 will be an exciting area
to watch.
See also:-
Squeak! - RAM SSDs
versus Flash SSDs - which is Best?
the Top 10 SSD OEMs in Q4 2007
Editor:- January 18, 2008
-
STORAGEsearch.com today published a new edition of - "the Top 10
Solid State Disk OEMs."
Covering the quarter ending
December 31, 2007 - there's a new #1, and a newcomer to the list. The article
also looks at market milestones and changes since the previous quarters.
4
of the top 10 companies market rackmount SSDs.
If you're choosing
SSD suppliers or strategic
partners - this is the must-see predictive list of the top companies that
matter - based on hundreds of thousands of readers searching for SSD content
on the site rated most highly by SSD companies themselves. ...read the article
EMC Re-enters the SSD Market
SANTA
ANA, Calif - January 14, 2008 - STEC, Inc. today announced that EMC
Corp has selected STEC's Zeus-IOPS line of SSDs for deployment in its
Symmetrix DMX-4 high-end networked storage systems.
"We believe that
flash-based solid
state storage is a game changing technology and that STEC is at the
forefront of the SSD market," said Brian Gallagher, senior VP and general
manager, EMC Storage Division. "Over the past year, EMC and STEC have
collaborated to ensure that the Zeus-IOPS Fibre Channel drive meets the
stringent quality, availability and reliability requirements of the enterprise
storage market. The resulting integration of enterprise-class SSDs with the full
breadth of Symmetrix DMX-4 features, capabilities and traditional disk drives
will provide our customers with unprecedented levels of performance and energy
efficiency for their most demanding applications."
"This is strong validation of our leadership position in
providing SSDs to the Enterprise storage market, and we are delighted to partner
with EMC in delivering the highest performance enterprise storage solutions,"
said STEC's CEO Manouch Moshayedi. ...EMC profile,
...STEC profile
Editor's
comments:- You may not realise that EMC was an SSD pioneer 20 years ago
(in 1987)
but got burned at that time. In today's market EMC's introduction of an SSD
option in its product line fills an important gap. Without this step - I doubt
if the company could maintain its market position - as solid state storage will
become a bigger part of server spending in the next 5 years.
In a
separate communication about this today
EMC said
that flash SSDs use 38% less energy than traditional
mechanical disk drives
and that a single (high speed) F-SSD could replace 30x 15,000 RPM Fibre
Channel hard disks in transaction intensive applications. None of this is news
for STORAGEsearch.com readers who
have been following the SSD
market's progress in recent years. But what is news is that it's EMC saying
it.
Advanced Media Demos SSD RAID at CES
Las Vegas.
NV - January 4, 2008 - Advanced Media, Inc. announced today that during
CES it will be demonstrating its 2.5" SATA flash SSD in a RAID
configuration that offers 260MB/s Read and 130MB/s Sequential Write speed.
"Ridata SSD now supports multiple drives on a system's main board
with an on-board RAID controller" remarked Harvey Liu, Advanced Media
President. "It increases storage capacity, but will also jump start
performance by multiple times as well!"
...Advanced
Media profile
EasyCo Shows Power of Managed Flash SSD
Technology in RAID-5
Wallingford
PA - December 2, 2007 - EasyCo LLC (a North American distributor for
Mtron Flash SSDs) has just completed detailed performance testing on
Mtron drives, both as single drives and in RAID-5 arrays.
These
tests provide concrete performance numbers for using Mtron drive in performance
critical applications such as database and transaction servers, as well as in
more widely used products such as laptops.
Of special interest will be confirmation that Flash SSDs operate
differently in RAID-5 arrays.
Hard drives running
RAID-5 normally perform significantly slower than those configured RAID-10.
With Flash, RAID-5 and RAID-10 perform virtually identically.
At large
block sizes, the Mtron drive is 10-40% faster than a 15K RPM hard drive,
mostly depending on what part of the HDD you are accessing. When coupled with
the MFT management layer, the Mtron drives are basically 50x faster than
a 15K HDD regardless of the read/write mix.
...read
the article (pdf), ...EasyCo
profile, ...Mtron profile
Solid Data Systems Names New CTO
SANTA CLARA,
Calif - November 26, 2007 - Solid Data Systems, Inc. today announced
the promotion of SSD solutions expert Mark Hayashida to the position of
Chief Technology Officer.
In this role, Mr. Hayashida will head
the growing Professional Services Organization, integral to the company's
strategic initiative to bring greater awareness and knowledge of SSD
architecture and benefits to market. A veteran of Solid Data for 9 years,
Hayashida oversees all pre-sales engineering, and is responsible for insuring
effective customer architecture solutions.
"Mark is the
industry's leading architect in the use of
SSDs and has designed
innovative architectures for leading Fortune 500 companies, including AT&T,
Charles Schwab and Southern Company," said Wade Tuma, CEO of Solid Data. "Mark
has the expertise to quickly evaluate and optimize systems to take cost
effective advantage of the benefits of SSD technology. Mark is the author of
many of our technical
whitepapers and brings great depth and knowledge to the team."
Hayashida's appointment follows the growing industry trend of
replacing large RAID arrays
with SSD arrays in core, high transaction rate applications. With the
ever-increasing transaction rates in applications for ecommerce and online
transaction processing such as Internet banking, online insurance, real-time
billing and electronic trading, enterprises find SSDs provide cost-effective,
terabyte-scale storage for fast access and data manipulation of large databases.
SSD-based architectures also provide greater power efficiency for today's "green"
world, due to the fact that SSD arrays themselves use substantially less power
than traditional RAID arrays, as well as enabling substantial server
consolidation.
...Solid Data Systems
profile, Storage People | |
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article:- SSD Market History |
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Founded in 1973,
DSI is the premier
supplier of solid state disk solutions
to the financial services
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2008 SSD
Budgets
Robbing Peter to Pay Paul? |
Editor:- January 2, 2008 -
Happy New Year to You all.
I've got a question for you - how
big is your
solid state storage budget
in 2008?
I hazard to guess that most of you haven't put anything
notionally marked as "SSD spending" in 2008's budget - even if you
already have a good idea about what you're going to spend on traditional storage
products and services.
I also predict that when the crunch comes - and
you find yourself spending surprisingly large amounts of money on SSDs for the
first time - these costs will be initially allocated to other cost centers -
such as servers or PCs - rather than storage.
It was always thus.
In 1983 for example - over 90% of corporates didn't have a budget for buying
IBM PCs. These disruptive tools intitially crept in under the IT department
radar - as users found they could do useful jobs like word processing and
business analysis quicker, cheaper and more conveniently than using the clunky
alternatives then on offer by their IT departments. Similarly
RAID systems did not
appear in most 1990 corporate IT budgets - but are now everywhere.
In
2007 the SSD
industry surprised many by introducing many exciting new technologies and
products.
I predict that in 2008 - innovative users will surprise the
SSD market by discovering for themselves a new generation of killer
applications- enabled by SSDs - which would have been technically impossible -
or even nuts to try and achieve using conventional
hard disk based
technologies. Those SSD sparks will feed back to fan the flames of the market.
Examples might include what I call - enterprise spreadsheet analysis -
in which business managers are enabled to model "what if?" scenarios
on duplicate sets of their entire customer database - to find gaps in their
marketing or test ideas for new products.
Other applications enabled
by SSD accleration might include AI enabled real-time upselling offers on
ecommerce web sites. These are already feasible for innovative small to
medium size companies but are not scalable with today's magnetic disk arrays.
Large enterprises can't be nimble with their data because their servers would
grind to a halt if you tried these types of tricks.
I'm not going to
give you a long list of predicted disruptive SSD technology enabled applications
- because they would be wrong - and you're going to see them coming thick and
fast from real users on these pages soon enough.
2008 will be the year
that users - rewrite the rules on how they mix and match new storage
technologies in ways that the original manufacturers of those products - never
dreamed about. | | |
