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
New Directory - PCIe SSDs
Editor:-
April 21, 2008 - STORAGEsearch.com published a new article and
directory of PCIe SSDs.
It lists all oems who make these products,
includes related news and discusses the advantages and disadvantages of bus
connected SSDs. ...read
the article
the Flash SSD Performance Roadmap
Editor:- April 17, 2008 -
STORAGEsearch.com published a new article today called - the Flash SSD
Performance Roadmap.
This answers questions like...
- How fast are flash SSDs going to be in 2009? or 2012?
- What are the technology factors which relate to throughput and IOPS?
- And what is the theoretical gap between future flash SSD and RAM SSD
performance?
...read the article
the Top 10 SSD OEMs in Q1 2008
Editor:- April 2, 2008 -
STORAGEsearch.com today published the 4th edition of - "the Top
10 Solid State Disk OEMs."
Covering the quarter ending
March 31, 2008 - the article also looks at market milestones and comments on
changes since the earlier quarters.
Inevitably - over 60
SSD oems couldn't make it
into the top 10 SSD list (and that includes
enterprise rackmount
SSD wannabe EMC which
lay just outside at #11.)
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
Texas Memory Systems Celebrates 30 Years of 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
Solid Data Expands SSD Services
SANTA CLARA, CA -
January 29, 2008) - Solid Data Systems, Inc. today announced the
expansion of its professional services organization.
This group
helps users optimize the use of SSDs
in high transaction rate applications and is aligned by vertical industry
expertise. Solid Data's services program offers free initial phone
consultation, on-site architectural assessment and evaluation, and technical and
cost analysis on proposed SSD-based architectural solutions.
"In
the past SSDs were often used as quick fixes, only replacing key hot files,"
said Mark Hayashida, CTO of Solid Data Systems. "The mission of Solid Data
Professional Services is to introduce architectures specifically designed around
solid state disk storage. These architectures bring more than performance to
high transaction rate environments. Once the limitation of mechanical disk
drives is removed, the resulting systems are simpler, use much less power, and
reduce the number of servers required. In addition, peak transaction capacity is
dramatically increased, virtually eliminating server crashes due to overload. In
properly architected systems the savings more than compensate for the additional
cost of the SSD..."
...Solid Data Systems
profile
Editor's comments:- this is a welcome move because as
new vendors enter the enterprise SSD market - there will be many examples of
the technology being mis-sold for applications which get no real benefit because
the SSDs have been deployed incorrectly. That's like hitching a
Porsche to plow
your field. It may have the horsepower - but it's not going to go any faster
than the John Deere... There's no
substitute for expertise when deploying this technology.
TMS Sets New SPC Records
Houston, Texas - January 28, 2008
- Texas Memory Systems, Inc. today announced that it has broken the
world data storage performance record and price-performance record again.
The new records were achieved using standard server and storage network hardware
and the TMS RamSan-400
solid state disk. Based on audited results submitted to the vendor-neutral
Storage Performance Council
the RamSan-400 SSD delivered a record 291,208.58 SPC-1 IOPS with a record
average response time of just 0.86 milliseconds. It also set a new SPC-1
Price-Performance record by delivering that performance at just $0.67 per SPC-1
IOPS.
...Texas Memory
Systems profile
...Later:- a few days later IBM's storage
blogger Tony Pearson, a self proclaimed SSD skeptic, published some interesting
comments
about the TMS news story and SPCs in general.
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
Texas Memory Systems Demos 8GFC SSD
Houston, Texas - October 16, 2007 -
Texas Memory Systems today announced that its RamSan-400 solid state
disk is part of the FCIA's demonstration of 8 Gigabit Fibre Channel
at this week's Storage Networking World conference in Dallas.
8GFC technology will double the data transfer rate between servers and storage
in Fibre Channel
SANs. SNW attendees can
view the 8GFC SAN demonstration at the FCIA booth P1, and they can visit Texas
Memory Systems at booth C21. The 8GFC specification is scheduled for
ratification in December 2007 and will be backward compatible with 4GFC and
2GFC.
The RamSan-400 solid state disk subsystem from Texas Memory
Systems is ideally suited to complementing 8GFC as it can deliver up to 3,000
megabytes per second of bandwidth, and sub-15 microsecond response time.
...Texas Memory
Systems profile, Storage
Events
Fastest SCSI SSD at High Performance on Wall Street
New
York City, NY - September 17, 2007 - Solid Access Technologies today
demonstrated the Universal Solid State Disk 200 at the High Performance on
Wall Street event.
The USSD 200 augments existing server
hardware and eliminates the root cause of I/O bottlenecks by increasing random
I/O access speeds 250x faster than
hard disk drives.
The demand for rapid information retrieval is growing at an incredible
rate. Impressive improvements have occurred in CPU performance and storage
capacity, but hard disk drive I/O processing speed has not experienced
comparable advances. Mechanical disks cannot access data fast enough to keep up
with the speed of contemporary processors. As a consequence,
transaction-intensive enterprise applications continue to be plagued by I/O
bottlenecks that limit their throughput and productivity.
Recently
named one of the Top 10
Most Important SSD Manufactures by Storagesearch.com,
Solid Access is helping to dramatically improve response times in high-volume
I/O traffic applications with the USSD 200 acceleration device whose features
include:- world's fastest SCSI SSD, the industry's first and only SSD with
3GB/s SAS interface,
95,000 random IOPS via a single fibre channel port and 3,600MB/s aggregated
bandwidth via multi fibre channel links (full duplex).
Tomas Havrda, managing partner, Solid Access Technologies commented -
"(Our) mature SSD technology attacks the root cause of I/O bottlenecks by
augmenting existing hard disk drive environments for just those files that make
the difference between success and failure.¨ ...Solid Access
Technologies profile
Hard / Flash / RAM Disk Performance in Databases
Editor:-
August 24, 2007 - Solid Data Systems today published a new white paper
called - "Comparison of Drive Technologies for High-Transaction Databases."
Database transactions are by nature random and usually come with small block
sizes. The article, written by Wade Tuma, founder and CEO of Solid Data
Systems, analyzes and tabulates cost and performance tradeoffs between
hard drives,
flash-based solid
state disks and DRAM-based
SSDs.
It discusses considerations in choosing the right
technology and provides a viewpoint on performance comparison using
industry-standard benchmarks and handy graphical guides for estimating read and
write database performance improvements. ...Solid Data Systems profile,
...read
the article (pdf)
Editor's comments:- last week
STORAGEsearch.com published a major
article RAM
versus Flash SSDs - which is Best? which included sub articles written by
6 leading SSD industry experts.
Wade Tuma was on my invitation list
for that article and was already part way through writing his own (the subject
of today's news story). But due to other commitments it missed my deadline.
Well it's ready today and you should read all the articles to get a balanced
picture. Whatever you thought you knew about this subject even 6 months ago is
obsolete. New price shifts and technologies have changed the rules of what's a
viable solution. |
|
| RAM versus
Flash SSDs - War for the Datacenter Core |
Editor:- August 20,
2007 - STORAGEsearch.com today published a major new article
on the SSD market called - "RAM versus Flash SSDs - which is Best?"
We've been writing for years about the subject of
hard disks vs
flash SSDs.
There's a lot of consensus now about which technology will prevail in the
disputed application slots for a single drive.
The next multibillion
dollar war in the SSD market will be for domination in the high performance
rackmount server acceleration space.
Hard disks will retain no
finger holds in this war -
even if the
price of a hard disk drops to zero. Sorry guys. Hanging onto the hard disks
in your hot server core will kill your company - because they will make your
business applications too slow, too expensive and too unreliable. Outside the
core... as bulk content storage or
disk to disk backup is
another matter, for another article.
The SSD server core war will be
internecine - one type of solid state storage versus another. The title of this
article " "RAM versus Flash SSDs" is misleading because there
are many distinctly different products fighting under each similar looking
flag. With specially written features from the world's leading SSD companies
- this article will change the way that you think about SSDs in enterprise
server applications. 2007 will be seen as the Year of SSD Revolution. ...read the article,
...75 more articles
about Solid State Disks
Attorn Launches Rackmount HyperDrive4 Array
Zaandam, Netherlands - August 3, 2007 -
Attorn BV today announced the release of its HyperDrive4 solid state
RAID arrays.
These arrays, based on DDRRAM, provide up to 576GB of
high-speed, non-volatile storage that dramatically increase response times and
throughput for I/O-intensive applications. The patented HyperDrive4 delivers
fast access times - 250 nanoseconds for write requests and 1.1 microseconds for
reads.
The HyperDrive4 arrays are available in rackmount or tower
configurations. They can deliver a maximum IOPS of 104,000 (IOMeter) and a
maximum available STR of 850MB/s (HDTach). This makes the HyperDrive4 arrays a
superior replacement for high-end
RAID arrays or an
alternative to in-server memory systems.
With a price of around $250
per GB the HyperDrive4 product line offers the lowest published price for a
RAM based solid state drive.
The arrays incorporate several levels of data protection including:- a
redundant power supply, batteries and back-up
hard drives.
...Attorn
profile
New Company Attacks Data Center SSD Pricing
Editor:-
August 2, 2007 - Violin Memory, Inc. today launched an attack on the
high end solid state disk acceleration market with the public début of
the highest density rackmount memory system.
Designed for HPC
and data center applications, the aggressively priced Violin 1010 connects via
PCIe and supports 504GB of DRAM in a 2U chassis. Capacity can scale to 10
terabytes. Read write throughput is upto 1,400MB/s and 1,000MB/s respectively
with 3 microseconds latency. Violin says this can deliver over 3 million
random IOPS.
The
Violin 1010
Memory Appliance is based on the patent-pending Violin Switched Memory (VXM)
technology. VXM packs a 2U high Violin 1010 chassis with up to 84 Violin
Intelligent Memory Modules which accommodate either
DRAM or
Flash memory. Higher
density NAND Flash VIMMs will be released later.
While hard disk
arrays are optimized for file accesses greater than a megabyte, the Violin 1010
supports full throughput for access sizes less than a kilobyte. The Violin 1010
provides significant benefits to applications with requirements for low latency
or small file sizes. Video server applications benefit from the ability to have
the same video simultaneously read by thousands of clients, without disk
thrashing.
The Violin 1010 has been designed to provide
cost-effective memory redundancy and protect against data loss. Its RAID
algorithms store data redundantly across multiple VIMMs. The fully loaded system
contains up to 4 hot spare VIMMs and supports non-disruptive replacement of
VIMMs. Multiple VIMMs in the system can fail without the application losing any
data.
The Violin 1010 Memory Appliance has been in trials for 6
months and is now available. A 504GB system is being demonstrated at
LinuxWorld (August 7-9 in San
Francisco). Pricing for a 120GB DRAM system starts at $39,500. ...Violin Memory profile
Editor's
comments:- although Violin doesn't call its new systems
solid state disks - that's
the best way to think about them - because they can do a similar server
acceleration job as a classic
RAM based SSD - but at
a much lower price.
Part of the cost saving is because the memory
array is volatile (data is lost when the power goes off). But in most data
center applications that limitation has a simple workaround. Another part of the
cost saving is the use of a PCI
express interface instead of the classic
Fibre-channel,
SAS or
Infiniband ports
which connect other enterprise SSDs.
Violin is the first SSD oem to
step across the artificial dividing line between
flash SSDs and
RAM SSDs - they will
offer both. I've said for years that most enterprise customers don't care. They
just want the best solution at the best price.
As with any product
from a new company platform support is currently limited. Also reliability is an
unknown factor. But Violin's entry into the SSD market (along with the 60%
quarter to quarter drop in DRAM prices quoted recently by
Qimonda's CEO) means
that enterprise server customers can expect to get a taste of the SSD price
wars which have been upto now confined to the
flash SSD market.
Solid Data Launches Terabyte Fibre-Channel SSD
SANTA CLARA,
Calif. - July 17, 2007 - Solid Data Systems, Inc. today StorageSPIRE
solid-state disk arrays providing up to a Terabyte of high-speed, non-volatile
storage.
StorageSPIRE
utilizes Solid Data's patented SSD technology, capitalizing on the company's 15
years experience in solid-state
disk solutions. With immediate response to read or write commands, SSDs
eliminate large server queues; thus, dramatically improving server stability and
response times during peak periods.
StorageSPIRE's advanced design provides persistent, non-volatile data
retention and easy configuration with no special device drivers required.
Designed with 4 Gigabit data paths and up to 12
Fibre Channel
connections, StorageSPIRE supports direct-connect, arbitrated loop and switched
fabric mode configurations with 500G to 1T of high-performance data capacity per
enclosure.
StorageSPIRE complements existing
SANs and
NAS by presenting a high
volume of LUNs to servers and serving data 10 to 50x faster than
mechanical disks, eliminating I/O bottlenecks. The StorageSPIRE solution deploys
transparently in the data center to preserve current infrastructure,
applications, file systems, and storage management software.
...Solid Data Systems
profile
Editor's comments:- with pricing around $800 per Gigabyte
this product will increase competition in the high end enterprise server
acceleration market. |
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Founded in 1973,
DSI is the premier
supplier of solid state disk solutions
to the financial services
industry. | |
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Squeak!
- the Fastest Solid State Disks
Speed isn't everything, and
it comes at a price. |
But if you do
need the speediest SSD
then wading through the web sites of over 55 current
SSD oems to find a suitable
candidate slows you down.
And the SSD search problem will get even
worse. |
 | |
I predict
there will be over 100 SSD oems in 2008.
I've done the research for
you to save you time. And this page is updated daily from
storage news and direct
inputs from oems. ...read
the article, | |
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