| Top
20 SSD OEMs - based on search volume Q2 2011 - ©StorageSearch |
| rank |
company |
editor's comments and recent
milestones |
| 1 |
|
Same as before.
This is
Fusion-io's 10th straight quarter in the #1 slot. Fusion-io's search volume
was 68% higher than the #3 ranked company in this list.
Fusion-io
has become the yardstick by which all other enterprise PCIe SSD companies are
judged - having achieved design wins with most of the world's leading server
oems and having set many performance records.
Fusion-io epitomizes
what I call the
New Dynasty
architectural trend in the enterprise SSD market. What I mean by that is that
Fusion-io's technology is more suited to new SSD aware server installations and
less suitable as a bolt-on accelerator for legacy setups.
That
nevertheless still leaves a wide door open for other competitors to walk
into the legacy side of the PCIe SSD datacenter - and encouraged by Fusion-io's
legitimization of this interface and form factor more than 30 SSD companies
have launched products in the PCIe SSD market since Fusion-io started to
pioneer this segment in
2007.
In
this quarter Fusion-io became a $2.4 billion (market cap)
publicly
traded company.
In the leadup to that I got many more questions
from investors about the enterprise SSD market than usual - and questions
about how all the various companies compared.
Who competes with whom?
Who's going to win etc? Even when these were coming from readers who had
already done a lot of research and talked to other SSD market analysts it
showed that a lot of stuff which is clear to me (and a few others) is still
muddled and foggy out there.
Suggested reading...
Can you
trust SSD market data?
Decloaking
hidden memory segments in the enterprise
Where are we
heading with memory systems and software?
consolidation
in the enterprise SSD box market - maladies and cures |
| 2 |
|
Up 1 place since the last quarter.
By
any measure SandForce today is the best known and most successful designer of
SSD controllers - with over 30 SSD oems using its technology.
To my way
of thinking one of the strengths of the top SSD oems series is that our search
volume methodology was sensitive enough to predict this success and catapaulted
SandForce staright into these listings in the same quarter as it emerged from
stealth mode.
Most people don't need SandForce driven SSDs.
(Other controllers are available.) But today any company which sells
2.5" SSDs almost
has to apologize to web readers if it doesn't use SandForce inside and
explain the reasons why. That's how strong the positioning of SandForce has
become.
From the technical perspective - within the 2.5" form
factor - there are several competing SSDs which go faster. And if
fibre-channel is your
preferred interface - there isn't a standard bridge chip solution for the SF
processors yet. (And I doubt if FC is a priority.) The company told me last
year that PCIe
bridging (and scaled performance) is technically feasible for them to
support and may be an attractive business prospect - if and when the PCIe SSD
market size gets big enough.
SandForce's
skinny cache
architecture makes it easier to fit into smaller form factors too. And several
industrial SSD
makers have adopted their controllers for that reason - even if they have are
using other solutions in their 2.5" products.
With the financial
markets waking up to the idea of SSDs in this quarter I was asked a lot
questions about SandForce - including how much would they be worth? You can see
my answer in their profile page. I'm glad I made it a relative number and not an
absolute figure - because in the SSD bubble - dollar numbers are wearing out
faster than x5
MLC flash.
See also:-
SSD company
acquisitions - who acquired whom |
| 3 |
|
Down 1 place since the last quarter.
STEC
has been making flash drives for embedded applications for 15 years - but
although their SSD technologies have changed a lot in that time you could
easily be forgiven for thinking that the thinking behind their marketing
hasn't changed much since the mid 1990s. By which I mean - they still behave as
though they were swimming in an SSD pool of 5 sharks rather than hundreds.
Nowadays
many people who look at the markets which STEC helped to pioneer
learned their own SSD market education from competing SSD companies - and
they don't buy into the STEC implied concept of "trust us - we're an
SSD company and know best" argument which in the absence of any other
clear messages (or hard technical data) - has been the inferred marketing
groove which STEC has been stuck in for the past several years.
And
potential customers aren't impressed by the fact that EMC might have designed
STEC's SSDs into its storage boxes a few years ago - because they also know
from STEC's financial reports that EMC didn't sell them fast enough. And
anyway EMC isn't a leader in the SSD market - and could buy a different bunch of
SSDs - or
a different SSD
company - next week. EMC's endorsement or lack of it doesn't count for
much in the SSD world - because EMC is a long way behind the installed capacity
of SandForce or Fusion-io's various partners.
Instead what people
want to know are hard facts and better reasons why they should be looking at
STEC. And that analysis starts with comparing STEC to other companies. Some of
the questions I've been asked recently - have been.
- how does STEC compare to Fusion-io?
- how does STEC compare to SandForce?
- is SanDisk's acquisition of Pliant a big threat to STEC?
STEC is
well aware of what I think about the weakness of their past marketing
communications strategy - because I talk to them - like I talk to most of the
other hundreds of SSD companies listed on this site. STEC does have a good
story to tell - although why they've left it so long to begin talking about
their internal flash technology assets is a real mystery to me. |
| 4 (joint) |
|
Up 2 places since the last quarter.
Violin
is another SSD company which investors and analysts were frothing about in this
quarter. I'm surprised I got anything written for the website at all - with all
the emails and calls flying back and forth.
I'd already written a lot
about Violin before this buzz started. You can read my various comments and an
interview linked in their profile page.
As usual - most people start
by comparing them with Fusion-io - which in my view shows that a little
knowledge can be a dangerous thing.
Fusion-io and Violin are in the
same set - when t comes to the "big versus little
SSD architecture fence". But they are in different sets on the "new dynasty versus
legacy divide." They're in 2 segments of my 6 segment enterprise
SSD market model - which I partly described in my
Petabyte SSD article.
These 2 companies make SSDs which fit into complimentary rather than
competing roles. |
| 4 (joint) |
|
Same as before.
Texas Memory
Systems, has been operating continuously in the SSD market longer than any other
company. Despite that the company has often surprised me with its technical and
marketing innovations.
In this quarter TMS demonstrated that it was
staying in the race for hot rod enterprise PCIe SSDs - with the launch of a new
model designed to fit into smaller slots and appeal to oems (read launch news
interview).
TMS also filled a long vacant
1U market gap
in the fast SAN SSD market. |
| 6 |
|
Down 1 place since the last quarter.
Earlier
this year OCZ bought itself an SSD controller company (well downstream
performance-wise to SandForce and nestling comfortably at the entry level
consumer end of the market). Despite that OCZ still uses SandForce controllers
in its faster SSDs.
OCZ has been a sales phenomenon ($69
million SSD revenue in the recent quarter) but in some ways it reminds me
of early dotcom companies - which focused on growth regardless of whether such
market share was worth having.
To me OCZ's product line looks more
like a scaled up consumer distributor than that of a mid range enterprise or
industrial company.
At some stage I think the company is going to have
to decide what markets it's really in - and exit the least profitable segments.
|
| 7 |
|
Up 1 place since the last quarter.
WD's
SiliconDrive SSD family - aimed at high reliability applications in the embedded
systems market - was first launched in 2004. WD still uses its own controllers
in its SiliconDrive (SLC) industrial SSDs - but 3rd party controllers in its
(MLC) notebook range.
The big change in WD's SSD business is going to
happen later this year as a result of its previously discussed acquisition of
Hitachi GST.
Although
the costly part of this $4 billion deal is a hard disk business - the
interesting part (in this context) is new enterprise SSDs which will become part
of WD's product family.
WD has cultivated a good reputation for
reliability - in its SSD customer base - but the company's present product line
occupies performance bands well below that of SandForce driven SSDs. The
new
enterprise SSDs from Hitachi will take WD's SSD reach into markets
currently targeted by STEC, SandForce and SanDisk (Pliant). |
| 8 |
|
Up 4 places since the last quarter.
By
more than coincidence Pliant and SanDisk both moved up 4 places and
remained closely coupled in their rankings in this edition of the top SSD
companies list - as well as closely coupling in the real world - where they
were joined in a $327 million acquisition which was announced in May.
Here's
some of what I said when the deal was first announced.
"This
acquisition theoretically fixes complimentary strategic weaknesses for both
companies:- no customers (Pliant) and no enterprise IP (SanDisk)."
The way I viewed this was that Pliant's main value to a memory maker was they
had designed a fast SSD controller - which they had proved worked - because
they had a few oem customers.
The only problem was - this wasn't
Pliant's original business plan. They thought they would be an SSD company and
take a slice of STEC's SSD pie.
But SandForce killed those prospects
in the 2.5" market
- because many oems thought they could serve themselves better to STEC
pie using a SandForce steel shovel rather than a silver plated spoon from
Pliant. (They preferred adding their own profit margins to the flash memory
thanks very much.)
And you know what I said about STEC's marketing
communications (above) not being in the same class (school really) as Fusion-io
etc. Compared to Pliant - STEC's marketing was pretty good.
That's
the past
- what about the future?
If SanDisk doesn't mess this up... big
pause there - because they've got no track record worth a figleaf in the
enterprise market - and you can read what I said about their past enterprise
aspirations in earlier editions of this series - anyway to continue.
If
SanDisk doesn't mess this up... it can attack the high end 2.5" SSD market
and leverage Pliant's controller to be the #50th or so entrant in the PCIe SSD
market too.
What SanDisk currently lacks in enterprise marketing
brains may not matter much initially - because as a consumer company -
they're culturally more used to the idea of investing money in ads and
marketing messages.
Since nobody understands the SSD market anyway
(You Dear Reader are the exception) - this could be a time of opportunity
when talking loudly and sending out lots of messages about a new SSD gets
the job done just as well as talking quietly and sensibly behind the intranet
and at events that
nobody goes to. We'll see.
PS - it's reasonable to ask - what would
the rank of the combined SanDisk/ Pliant SSD company had been in this quarter?
That works because the businesses had no market overlap. If I filter out the
effect of the acquisition announcement on Pliant - then the combined SSD
business would have been #5 in this list. |
| 9 |
|
| 10 |
|
Down 3 places since the last quarter.
RunCore's
announcements in this quarter mostly had a samey element about them.
- This is a new show we're going to.
- This is our new SSD model with SandForce inside.
- This is a new review which shows how great our products are.
You
know the sort of thing I mean. I can't get excited by these things - which are
the same as hundreds of other SSD press releases I see every month. I don't
think they merit mentions in my news pages. But they might have been
mentioned in other publications. |
| 11 |
|
Down 1 place since the last quarter.
I've
lost count of how many compamies have said they offer terabyte 2.5" SSDs
in 9.5mm high packages since
January 2009
when the first such product was announced.... Lots.
Anyway you can now
add Foremay to that list. |
| 12 |
|
Down 3 places since the last quarter.
As
far as I know nobody acquired Intel, and Intel didn't acquire any SSD companies
in this quarter.
Too busy talking about its processors - I guess. |
| 13 |
|
Re-entry into the top 20 list.
In
this quarter Toshiba announced it was sampling 19nm MLC flash memory.
If you're not au fait with memory geometries that's a size which
technologists once predicted would be difficult / impossible to achieve with
flash.
I guess that's why we're all using PCM / MRAM / PRAM based SSDs
nowadays then instead of flash which as we now know became obsolete in about
2006 according to many
nv RAM futurologists.
I recently noticed that Toshiba has some
good educational / market intro style videos on its
SSD videos page - which
discuss reliability, MLC versus SLC endurance and performance - which also put
into context reliability issues versus hard drives. |
| 14 |
|
Up 3 places since the last quarter.
In
this quarter SMART announced that it had agreed to be acquired by investment
firm Silver Lake Partners in a deal
worth approximately $645 million. |
| 15 |
|
Down 4 places since the last quarter.
In
this quarter Seagate said it aims to raise $600 million in a bond deal.
The
company didn't say anything interesting about its SSDs - but its
SSD
education page - which mostly consists of papers which it paid
IDC to write - is much
better reading than it used to be. |
| 16 |
|
First appearance in the top SSD companies
list.
This has been a long hard road for Virident - who shipped its
first enterprise accelerating PCIe SSDs in June 2010.
One of the
reasons for that delay may be because the PCIe SSD market has been getting very
crowded and in all the confusion about who's doing what with whom and who
intends doing things but hasn't done anything yet - one company - Fusion-io
started before anyone else and has been much better at getting its message
out. And so Fusion-io is the name which most people have come to associate
with this market.
But there's more than one way to use PCIe SSDs, more
than one fastest
product, and many routes to market.
Virident - whose marketing
communications volume setting was stuck on mute for several quarters - was
actually proving to a bunch of serious enterprise oems that its products worked
and had the desirable feature of sustaining performance even when the
capacity was full. That's a complicated positioning message which is only
understood by people who already have done a lot of comparative benchmarking.
In this quarter Virident announced that it has been chosen as a
winner of the
Red Herring Top
100. And it was also one of several named technology partners in a launch by
auto tiering SSD
software developer FlashSoft. |
| 17 |
|
Down 3 places since the last quarter.
In
this quarter Kove announced that its XPD2 4U SSD had achieved over 11 Million
IOPS in a single addressable space and 28.5GB/s bandwidth, along with round trip
latency of 6 microseconds for read and 8 microseconds for writes. |
| 18 |
|
Up 2 places since the last quarter.
In
this quarter EMC announced it had created a flash business unit and will enter
the PCIe SSD market later this year.
The company did many SSD
announcements - but in my view they were mostly along the lines of announcing
the intention to do things in the sometime fuzzy future which I would have
expected they would already have completed if they were truly leading rather
than following SSD technology trends. |
| 19 |
|
Re-entry into the top 20 list.
BiTMICRO
had got so quiet in recent years that I wondered if they had gone back into
stealth mode.
It seems like they have a clearer positioning at the high
end of the performance range in the embedded enterprise and industrial SSD
market.
Their fastest product (2.5" fibre-channel SSD) uses their
own controller and has peak performance at the top end of the range for this
size of product.
They also published an excellent whitepaper on the
design factors associated with
surviving
sudden SSD power loss. You can find the links to that - and other related
papers in my article. |
| 20 |
|
Re-entry into the top 20 list.
I
haven't talked to the company recently so I'm guessing that DDRdrive simply
got sucked up to this visibility level due to its unique intersection with
2 segments of the SSD market which have been getting a lot of attention recently
- RAM SSDs and PCIe SSD cards. |
| Companies which dropped out of the
top 20 list in this quarter include:-
LSI,
Solid Access
Technologies, Samsung
and PhotoFast. |
