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tier 1 - 1U rackmount SSD
no single point of failure
lowest latency, highest density 1U FC SLC SSD
the RamSan-720 - from Texas Memory Systems
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rackmount SSDs - by Zsolt Kerekes, editor - January 16, 2012
I've been reporting on the rackmount SSD market since the early 1990s.

But what's the main reason that most users look for rackmount SSDs today?

That hasn't changed. It's speed (IOPS performance and low latency). The evidence for this is that in the 4th quarter of 2011 - the top 3 rackmount server vendors which appeared in StorageSearch.com's search stats were (in order) all of whom focus on high performance SAN compatible rackmount SSDs.

This focus on speed is understandable - but I expect it will change.

As the SSD market grows in size and users become more sophisticated - they will learn that rackmount SSDs can also represent the lowest cost way to buy storage. (The SSD racks don't have to be the fastest - just fast enough to do what they're supposed to do.)

That's the model of bulk SSD storage / cloud SSD storage - whatever you want to call it - where the SSD systems will be cheaper to own than hard disk based storage arrays. I described the roadmap to that market and the typical product characteristics in my article - this way to the Petabyte SSD.

By 2016 I expect that upto 50% of the searches for rackmount SSDs will be driven by the need to find the lowest cost storage capacity - instead of (as today) 98% being driven by the need for faster storage performance.

See also:- if Fusion-io sells more (PCIe) SSDs does that mean Violin will sell less (rackmounts)?
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Oceanspace enterprise SSD - click for more info
tier 1 FC SAN SLC SSD storage
Oceanspace Dorado2100
from Huawei Symantec
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looking for rackmount SSD vendors?
Editor:- are you searching for rackmount SSD companies? When the number of companies marketing rackmount SSDs started heading into the 100+ region I removed the long dangly vendor list which used to be on this page - because it was becoming unusable. Instead I suggest using the siet search below - and insert the words "rackmount SSD" along with another criterion which matters to you - such as iSCSI, FC SAN, fastest etc.
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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
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SAS, FC & SCSI enterprise solid state disks
from Solid Access Technologies
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Notes from SSD market history

The product shown below, from Imperial Technology
(which is no longer in business) is an example of a
rackmount SSD accelerated SAN router which was
featured here on StorageSearch.com in June 2003.
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MegaRam-5000 from  Imperial Technology
MegaRam-5000 Enterprise SSD SAN router
from Imperial Technology
. RAM SSDs
roadmap to the Petabyte SSD
the future of enterprise data storage?
What an Interface Says About an SSD
Are MLC SSDs Safe in Enterprise Apps?
the Problem with Write IOPS in flash SSDs
the new way of looking at Enterprise SSDs
Market Trends in the Rackmount SSD Market
Auto-tuning SSD Accelerated Pools of storage
RAM SSDs versus Flash SSDs - which is Best?
what happens in SSDs when the power goes down?
...
Sir Squeaks-a-Bit - image for rackmount SSD page
Sir Squeaks-a-Bit felt
undressed without a
full metal jacket.
.....
rackmount SSD news
SSD rack FAQs you shouldn't have to struggle to answer

Editor:- February 1, 2012 - what do you need to know about any new rackmount SSD? - is a new article published today on our home page.


Nimbus does that "no spof SSD" thing

Editor:- January 31, 2012 - Nimbus Data Systems today announced its entry into the high availability enterprise SSD market with the uveiling of the company's - E-Class systems - which are 2U rackmount SSDs with 10TB eMLC per U of usable capacity and no single point of failure. Unified interface support includes 10GbE, FC, and Infiniband.

Pricing starts at $150K approx for a 10TB dual configuration system.


Micron acquires PCIe SSD array IP for rackmounts

Editor:- January 20, 2012 - Micron today announced it has acquired the assets of UK based Virtensys which marketed rackmount SSDs stuffed with Micron's PCIe SSDs and supported by a patented multi-server sharing virtualization interface.

Editor's comments:- if buying an SSD software company was a good idea for leading PCIe SSD makers Fusion-io and OCZ - then Micron has to follow suit or get out of the game.

Chipmakers generally dislike buying "systems" software companies - because they don't understand systems and risk alienating their oem customers. But Micron's reputation won't be dented if they can't leverage the Virtensys software. Everyone knows how hard it is to get real value out of a software acquisition. And in the next few weeks more people will take another look at Micron's Micron's SSD pages. So it's paid for itself already.


will new RamSan rattle Violin?

Editor:- December 6, 2011 - Texas Memory Systems today announced imminent availability of the RamSan-720 - a 4 port (FC/IB) 1U rackmount SSD which provides 10TB of usable 2D (FPGA implemented) RAID protected and hot swappable - SLC capacity with 100/25 microseconds R/W latency (with all protections in place) delivering 400K IOPS (4KB), 5GB/s throughput - with no single point of failure (at $20K/TB approx list).

The new SSD uses a regular RAM cache flash architecture which in the event of sudden power loss has an ultra reliable battery array which holds up the SSD power for 30 seconds while automatically backing up all data in flight and translation tables to nonvolatile flash storage. On power up - the SSD is ready for full speed operation in less than a minute.

Aimed at HA tier 1 storage markets - the RamSan-720 consumes only 300-400 W - which makes it practical for high end users to install nearly 1/2 petabyte of SSD storage in a single cabinet - without having to worry about the secondary reliability and data integrity risks which can arise from high temperature build-ups in such enclosures.

Editor's comments:- I've been talking to TMS every month for over 10 years - and I've been writing about their memory appliances since the early 1990s - so you might think that I would have run out of things to say by now. When I saw the preliminary specs for the new RS-720 - the features which jumped out at me were:-
  • the low R/W latency for this class of SPOF product. Which is 2x as good as the next fastest product I know - the 6000 series fron Violin - and several times faster than some other tier 1 SSD vendors such as Kaminario and Huawei Symantec
  • the high storage density - over 3x better than Violin delivers in SLC - and close to the usable RAIDed capacity that a Fusion-io 1U server can deliver in MLC when using Octal.
A few days ago I spoke to Holly Frost, CEO and Dan Scheel, President of Texas Memory Systems about their new SSD, what they think about what's going on in the SSD market, and the philosophy that steers the design of their SSDs. In a hour long discussion I learned enough new stuff to write several new articles. So instead of condensing it down here into a couple of bullet points - I'm going to give you the benefit of what I learned in a new article tomorrow called - "StorageSearch talks SSD with Holly Frost."

Going back to my headline - will new RamSan rattle Violin? - I'm sure that Violin would say that this simply validates what they are doing (and shipping) already - and that the enterprise SSD market is big enough for all vendors in this category to keep growing at a healthy clip.


Kove snapshots financial markets 12x faster

Editor:- October 14, 2011 - STAC (a specialist in testing low latency platforms used in financial markets) has released audited benchmarks for Kove's XPD2 - a RAM SSD - in a setup configured with InfiniBand adapters.

This solution stack set several new official records. For example, the Market Snapshot benchmark was over 12x the previous best published speed. See also:- the fastest SSDs, record breaking storage


SDS shrinks SSD IOPS in VMware

Editor:- September 15, 2011 - the use of SSDs with VMware has popped up in these news pages in recent years more times than I care to count. But I got a new angle on this a few days ago in a discussion with Linda LaPorta, President of Superior Data Solutions .

Now you may ask - who is SDS? (the spelling is important here) and what do they know about SSDs? (It had been several years since I last heard from them too.) But you've all heard about STEC's ZeusIOPS - right? - Well SDS was selling this particular enterprise flash SSD design in 2006 - before STEC acquired it from Gnutek. An SDS platform was also one of Sun's early SSD offerings too. But SDS have switched focus from raw hardware to applications - and they are the US distributor for a product called VirtualStorm.

Linda LaPorta told me - "...Our software is changing the game in VDI. Right now IOPs is a big barrier to the acceptance of VDI because the cost to implement storage can be very high. (Windows 7 users are figuring 24-28 IOPs per VM…gets pricey if you need to provision HDAs for 10,000). We need a fast IO device to store the virtual applications. We like a fast SSD, but it only needs to be 100 to 200GB. It is a read only drive that stores the master image of each application. All the VM's go to a well cached raid system. This is where we reduce the IOPs to 2-4 /VM and we keep the capacity requirement to 3GB/per VM (which is actually making it AFFORDABLE to consider all SSD instead of HDDs)..."


How big was the thinking in the SSD design?

Editor:- July 5, 2011 - Why size really does matter in SSD design architecture is a new article recently published on StorageSearch.com

For designers, integrators, end users and investors - understanding what follows from simple Big versus Small architectural choices predicts a lot of important consequences. ...read the article


Kaminario carves new market for RAM SSDs

Editor:- March 28, 2011 - Kaminario announced immediate availability of its K2 DRAM storage appliance a family of enterprise FC SAN rackmount RAM SSDs which scales up to 12TB and delivers 1.5 million IOPS with 16 GB/s throughput.

K2's entry level configuration provides 500GB of storage and delivers 150,000 IOPS with 1.6 GB/s throughput for $50,000. Kaminario's K2 has true N+1 high availability, including mirrored storage with automatic data recovery, redundant fibre channel connectivity and a UPS, to reduce the risk of losing data access.

Editor's comments:- I spoke to Gareth Taube, VP of Marketing and Dani Golan CEO about the new product and how they see Kaminario in the SSD market. We had a wide ranging discussion about the challenges in the enterprise SSD market, the growing new role of RAM SSDs, and how they solve the competing demands of reliability and speed. You can see those details in a new article published later today.

Overall I got the impression this is a company which really understands its market niche well and fills an important gap in the enterprise acceleration space which is not catered for economically by other vendors.

Re customers:- Kaminario said most of their customers already had experience with 2 or 3 previous SSD projects. Like all new SSD companies they like to talk about the successes they've had with accelerating enterprise apps performance in what I call the "usual suspects" - banks and other financial institutions - 10x speedup here, 25x speedup there. We've heard all that stuff before.

But Kaminario's products also match the budgets and performance needs of smaller companies in new markets. One of their customers in this category is Digital Trowel which extracts data from web sites and uses analysis and inference techniques to provide real-time alerts and predictions about stocks, prices, news and other significant market developments. That's the kind of "only with an SSD" can you do this - data factory model - I had in mind in my petabyte SSD article last year.

Digital Trowel 's CTO, Anton Bar said - "Other SSD storage had the same price, but much lower speed than the Kaminario K2 - a clear no-brainer. The bottom line is, the K2 shortened our identity resolution process by about 50%, and that's very important in our line of business."

Kaminario said its sweet spot in the hot data capacity range upto 12TB which is on the SAN and which has very high IOPS demand. Because Kaminario is unashamedly a RAM SSD company. Their "IOPS performance" doesn't need to be qualified by small print and hedging statements like those of flash SSDs. And I'll be saying more about the internal technology elsewhere. The best way to think about their ideal customer is the department in a large enterprise.

Kaminario said that many of their customers - having experienced the K2 - were now acting as internal evangelists to other parts of their organizations to advise them how to solve performance problems which had previously proved intractable to solutions by flash SSDs (due to latency) and traditional RAM SSDs (due to the complexities and side effects of failover architectures).


Surveys show SSDs still have low adoption in SANs

Editor:- February 24, 2011 -Dataram recently announced the results of a survey which they funded into FC SAN performance.

200 people responded to the survey which was carried out by a 3rd party.

48% said they add more storage and/or spindles to solve performance problems. (This is the tradional solution.)

45% said they are considering solid state storage for improved performance and efficiency, but less than 15% have already implemented a solid state solution.

Jason Caulkins, Dataram's Chief Technologist said "The fact that only 15% of respondents have deployed solid state indicates that there is plenty of room for growth in this market..."

Editor's comments:- these results are in tune with a different recent survey by Xiotech which said "only 9% already use or are evaluating SSDs. Another 8% responded that SSDs were in 2011 plans."

These results support the view that there is plenty of upside potential for the enterprise accelerator SSD market - because maybe as many as 80% of organizations which use SANs haven't yet deployed SSD accelerators. See also:- SSD market research.


Who buys enterprise accelerator SSDs? - and why?

Editor:- January 12, 2011 - In a new blog published today - Application Owners versus Data Center Operators - written by Woody Hutsell, Application Acceleration Practice Director at ViON - the author talks about what he learned in more than 10 years marketing very fast SSDs.

Woody Hutsell also suggests that some SSD vendors might benefit from changing their marketing tactics to segment the different interests in the user community. ...read the article


Kove launches 20 Gigabytes/s RAM SSD

Editor:- November 22, 2010 - Kove recently demonstrated a 4U InfiniBand & FC compatible terabyte class RAM SSD product line (with under 25 µS latency) called Xpress Disk - which can sustain 20GB/s throughput via 6x InfiniBand ports and 600,000 read IOPS and 500,000 write IOPS.

Editor's comments:- despite costing an order of magnitude more - the market for RAM SSDs hasn't been killed by flash.

On the contrary - all the vendors of high end RAM SSDs that I've spoken to in the past year say they have been pleasantly suprised to see demand for this type of product growing. The reason? - When a bunch of flash SSD accelerated servers hits a storage performance bottleneck - the only way to go faster is to interpose RAM SSDs. And unlike the old days when the first terabyte RAM SSDs became commercially available (2003) - users today are already amenable to the concept of SSD acceleration.
notes from SSD market history

You'd be surprised how long I've been writing about rackmount SSDs.
The banner ad (shown below) - ran here in April 2002.
And my editorial SSD coverage started 10 years before that!
click for more info - banner ad from 2002

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