Top 20 SSD
Companies - based on search volume Q1 2012 - © 2012 StorageSearch |
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| rank.... |
company |
notes........................................................... |
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| 1 |
Fusion-io |
Same as before.
This is
Fusion-io's 13th straight quarter in the #1 slot. Fusion-io's search volume
was more than
2x the level of the #2 ranked company in this list and
10x the level of the #20 company.
In this quarter - FIO
demonstrated the capabilities of its latency reducing Auto Commit Memory
(ACM) extension by being the 1st SSD company to
exceed
1 billion IOPS in a reasonably accessible (to mortal enterprise
budgets) 8 server configuration.
If you're reading this sometime
in 2016 (or later) - then to echo (and deliberately misquote)
Woody
Hutsell's December 2010 blog - I'd say - "One billion IOPS. Yawn!
Is that all you've got?"
But if you pause / reset your time
machine to today's date (or anytime later this year too) - and Google "billion
IOPS" - you'll see it still is / was a big deal.
See also:- the fastest SSDs |
|
| 2 |
Violin Memory |
Same as before.
In this
quarter - as part of the company's positioning itself as a great SSD company to
invest in (or acquire - or maybe even buy SSDs from) Violin published a video
explaining the
benefits
they get from having their own SSD controller architecture. |
|
| 3 |
LSI/SandForce |
Same as before.
Strictly
speaking 80% of the reader interest in LSI/SandForce in this period was related
to the SandForce controller part of the company. LSI itself would have been
ranked #20 in its own right based on reader interest in its PCIe SSDs and
software. Adding the LSI searches to the SandForce searches - didn't make any
difference to the #3 rank in this period.
In this quarter - LSI
announced it had
completed the
acquisition of SandForce.
LSI did some
significant
SSD launch stuff in Q2 too. But hey - this list is about what happened in
Q1. You'll have to come back later to see if enough people cared about the Nytro
roadmap. |
|
| 4 |
STEC |
Same as before.
In this
quarter - STEC continued to frustrate and astonish investors and analysts by
reporting
38% year on year decline from the year ago quarter - at a time when
the enterprise SSD market appeared to be in stampede growth mode.
I
said to one (of many) such SSD investment analysts who sounded me out on STEC's
business performance - "I've been talking regularly to STEC about the
SSD market for about 8 years. So my frustrations in what they have'nt done and
lost opportunities are bigger than those of any investors. (Despite that)...I
think STEC could still get much higher multiples of its current revenues than
it has achieved in recent quarters but it needs better marketing to do this."
If
you look back at past editions of this top SSD companies list (links at the
bottom of this page) you'll see that STEC's cargo cult belief that future
enterprise SSD business would always come in the next batch of oem customer
POs - has been a commonly recurring theme. |
|
| 5 |
OCZ |
Up 1 place since the last quarter.
This is OCZ's highest ranking in the history of these lists.
In this
quarter - OCZ announced
imminent shipments of new high capacity PCIe SSDs optimized for cloud apps.
The Z-Drive R4 CloudServ has up to 16TB of storage capacity on a single full
height card and is supported by auto-caching SSD ASAP fuctionality.
I'm
not a great fan of SSD
videos - but I did add
OCZ's
VDI bootstorm video (directed and produced by OCZ-SANRAD) to my favorites
list. |
|
| 6 |
Texas Memory Systems.... |
Down 1 place since the last quarter.
In
this quarter - TMS - which has for more than a decade positioned itself as the
company which designs the "world's fastest storage" - introduced a "fast-enough" PCIe
SSD - called the RamSan-80
as part of an SSD ASAP bundle which included software from NEVEX.
Rather
than being seen as a change in direction - the launch fitted into an emerging
pattern from TMS in the past year - which seems to be - that if they can adapt
their enterprise SSD IP to suit a distinct segment of user needs - by offering
a different set of optimized features (not just speed - but also other
dimensions like storage density and resilience) then they're willing to do it. |
|
| 7 |
Virident Systems |
Up 5 places since the last quarter.
This is Virident's highest ranking in the history of these lists.
In
this quarter - Virident published a bunch of articles and reports which
describe
and
validate
important design aspects of its enterprise SSDs which are commensurate
ingredients in its marketing goal to - "deliver predictable,
industry-leading SSD performance which scales across diverse workloads, data
sets, and sustains over time."
Virident's SSDs demonstrate the
value of reducing technology implicit biases in SSD design symmetries.
There are 11
core SSD architecture symmetries which are required to build the perfect
enterprise SSD. No designs in the market today are anywhere near perfect. The
best SSD designers currently struggle to achieve high scores in as many as
4 of these. |
|
| 8 |
SanDisk |
Same as before.
In this quarter - SanDisk
acquired
FlashSoft - one of
the leading independent software vendors in the
SSD ASAPs market. |
|
| 9 |
BiTMICRO |
Up 1 place since the last quarter.
In
this quarter - BiTMICRO
announced
that its new TALINO-DE
- SSD controller -
had gone through
tape-out
with Global Unichip. |
|
| 10 |
Kove |
Up 1 place since the last quarter.
In
this quarter - Kove remained at the top end of the
fastest SSDs list. |
|
| 11 |
WhipTail |
Up 9 places since the last quarter.
In
this quarter - WhipTail
announced
it had secured a Series B funding. |
|
| 12 |
SMART |
Up 2 places since the last quarter. |
|
| 13 |
WD |
Down 4 places since the last quarter. |
|
| 14 |
Anobit / Apple |
First appearance in the top SSD companies
list.
Anobit's acquisition by Apple in December 2011 meant that a
lot of people who hadn't previously tracked the SSD market wanted to see what
all the fuss was about. |
|
| 15 |
EMC |
Up 2 places since the last quarter. |
|
| 16 |
RunCore |
Down 3 places since the last quarter. |
|
| 17 |
Intel |
Up 2 places since the last quarter. |
|
| 18 |
Samsung |
Down 3 places since the last quarter. |
|
| 19 |
FlashSoft |
Down 1 place since the last quarter.
FlashSoft was acquired by SanDisk half way through the quarter. |
|
| 20 |
Toshiba |
Down 13 places since the last
quarter. |
|
2 companies dropped out of
the top 20 list in this quarter:-
Seagate and
DDRdrive |
