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This directory includes rackmount solid state disk arrays based on both flash SSDs and RAM SSDs. It includes SSD oems who actively market rackmount products and integrators such as EMC who sell RAID arrays populated with 3rd party SSD modules.

The number of vendors in this category could rise to several hundred in the next 3 years as enterprise users become more familiar with the benefits of this type of storage. It's a relatively easy matter for RAID systems oems to requalify their products to use SSDs. But unlike the transition to NAS which we chronicled in the late 1990s (where low performance products found valid application niches if they were cheap enough) the role of the SSD array today is primarily server acceleration. That means not all hard disk boxes will be optimal for use with SSDs. Slow bus interface adapters and slow RAID controllers will eat into the latency budget and squander potential SSD performance. I have no doubt that SSD arrays which are populated with low performance SSDs will also come to market as more companies leap onto this bandwaggon.

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2.5" SSD Guide / 3.5" SSD Guide
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the Top 10 Solid State Disk Companies
Are MLC SSDs Ever Safe in Enterprise Apps?
RAM SSDs versus Flash SSDs - which is Best?
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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

Violin will Demo InfiniBand Memory Array at SC07

Iselin, NJ - October 24, 2007 - Violin Memory, Inc. will exhibit the Violin 1010 Memory Appliance at SC07 in Reno, NV next month.

The Violin1010 will be network attached to the SCinet InfiniBand network during the show. The network technologies and partners to enable this attachment will be announced at the tradeshow. ...Violin Memory profile, Storage Events
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click to read article:- SSD Market History
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rackmount SSD OEMs
Asine

Attorn

BiTMICRO Networks

Concurrent Computer

Curtis

EasyCo

EMC

Fuji Xerox

Gear6

Imperial Technology

SeaChange International

SEEK Systems

Solid Access Technologies

Solid Data Systems

Taejin Infotech

Texas Memory Systems

Third I/O

TiGi

Vanguard Rugged Storage

Violin Memory

ViON
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disk
Hard disk drives

InfiniBand
InfiniBand

Flash Memory
Flash Memory

serial SCSI
Serial Attached SCSI

RAM
RAM

Military storage
Military STORAGE
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

Violin 1010 - world's densest  DRAM  array -  for  HPC and data center server acceleration
world's fastest 2U RAM-SSD
from Violin Memory

Dynamic Solutions International supplies solutions for the financial and banking markets
Founded in 1973, DSI is the premier
supplier of solid state disk solutions
to the financial services industry.

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

RamSan-400
RamSan-400 Enterprise Solid State Disk
The World's Fastest Storage
from Texas Memory Systems
1  terabyte solid state disk storage with 12x 4Gbps FC ports -  StorageSPIRE - from Solid Data Systems
StorageSPIRE
1 terabyte solid state disk
from Solid Data Systems

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

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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.

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