the Top SSD
Companies - Q4 201639th
quarterly edition
by
Zsolt Kerekes,
editor - StorageSearch.com
- March 10, 2017 |
Since this series began
10 years ago it has helped millions of readers in the SSD ecosystem confidently
identify emerging market patterns and significant new companies.
During
that time we saw flash
replace DRAM as the dominant SSD memory type,
PCIe SSDs changing the
nature of the server
market, the growth of the merchant
SSD controller market, the
birth of the
SSD software market
and its many children (including
software
defined everything, usable
rather than physical storage
pricing
models and lending a hand to the poor cousins still plowing with
horse drawn hybrid
storage arrays).
At the end of 2016 the SSD market reached a
dominant technology position where its products
defined
everything important in the external computing environment. But innovation
hadn't stopped and the SSD market had already begun looking inwards towards the
memory space and outwards
towards capturing data from a wider internet of things.
The next wave
of disruptive change in
memory
systems architecture has barely begun.
DIMM
wars and the growing number of value based tiered memory roles everywhere
is good for some kinds of memory solutions but it is being tempered by
Cassandra predictions
that there will be smaller settings at the table for old familiar memory
types - especially DRAM.
And another slimming effect (doing more
with less) being seen in all legacy applications is
greater
utilization from new architectures which are embedded in new SSD array
software. If legacy
was all - we'd be looking at much smaller future markets. But
SSD-everywhere
is unshackling the performance boundaries of the pre-SSD era.
Any
data anywhere can now be repurposed, upcycled and - if found valuable - can
be put to good use in a timely service delivery. And the world's data factory
is still at an early stage of play right now - similar to the pre-Amazon
Netscape web era on the dialup internet.
So it looks like we're going
to find this list useful for a little while longer yet. |
the Top 25 SSD Companies - Q4 2016based on reader search in this
period |
1 - (tied) - Pure Storage -
same as before
Pure Storage said after the quarter ended that it
expected to get $1 billion of revenue in 2017.
rackmount SSDs,
petabyte SSDs
1 - (tied) - Western
Digital
This is the first time at #1 for WD although 2 of the
SSD companies which it acquired in past years have been here before (Fusion-io and
SanDisk).
Although
it has taken many years for the branding effect to clarify we're now starting
to see a new SSD identity emerge from Western Digital which is distinct from the
sum of all the parts it has accumulated.
3 - Seagate
- down 1 place
The gap in search volume between the #1 and #3
in this quarter was at a historic low of just 22%.
M.2 SSDs,
SSD controllers,
SAS SSDs,
PCIe SSDs
4 - Foremay
- up 6 places
I guess you could say this is part of a "military"
wave in this list which you will also see below.
Foremay has been at
the forefront of shipping high capacity NVMe SSDs for military applications -
having nearly eliminated the traditional time lag of adoption for new interface
types in rugged markets.
At the core of this is much greater awareness
in defense systems designers about modern datacenter inspired architectures. And
long before the military market adopted SATA they had loved SCSI SSDs.NVMe is
the new SCSI. And it's got a plausible long term roadmap for those who like COTS
technology and wonder if the SSD they design in today will still be available
in 10 years.
SSD
security,
military SSDs
5 -
Toshiba - up 15
places
This ranking now includes combined searches for SSDs from
both Toshiba and OCZ.
Due to financial problems in Toshiba due to
losses in its nuclear business Toshiba - in the following quarter -
attracted a lot of attention due to speculation about selling some or all of its
flash and SSD business.
Shootout
At Yokkaichi
SAS
SSDs,
2.5" PCIe SSDs,
M.2 SSDs
6 - Violin
Memory - down 3 places
The long waiting game of would Violin
go bust or be rescued by some kind of magic ended in this quarter.
6
years ago Violin said it hoped to become a $1 billion revenue enterprise SSD
array company. From that time the direction of travel was down.
90%
of enterprise SSD companies have no good reasons to survive
7 - V&G
also formerly known as RunCore - up 7 places
Custom form factors
and combinations of design features are an important part of V&G's SSD
business.
military
SSDs,
custom SSDs
8 - Diablo
Technologies - same as before
Although more than 20 companies
have made their intentions clear in the nvm as RAM market there aren't many
whose solutions you can buy ready to run in integrated systems.
Diablo
is indisputedly the leader in the "NVDIMM flash as RAM" category.
But just as we saw in past phases of the SSD server acceleration
market - with PCIe SSDs
- when a market opportunity looks big enough - then competition comes in.
The
SCM DIMM wars picture is further complicated by the fact that form factors don't
matter as much as they used to due to the localization effect of new fabrics and
that genuinely new memory types are also hoping to get in on the act.
Having
said that - I think flash will remain the mainstream technology in this segment
in the short term as the newcomers have yet to prove their reliability.
new thinking in RAM,
big memory
controllernomics
9 - Nimbus
Data Systems - up 11 places
rackmount SSDs,
petabyte SSDs
10 - NGD
Systems - new name for NxGn Data - down 6 places
PCIe SSDs
11 - Micron
- down 4 places
hybrid DIMMs,
industrial SSDs,
boom bust
cycles in memory markets - SSD lessons
12 - Primary
Data - up 11 places
This is the highest rank so far for Primary
Data.
SSD
software
13 - Samsung
- down 4 places
consumer SSDs,
M.2 SSDs,
flash memory
14 - Kaminario
- down 1 place
rackmount SSDs,
trust and
enterprise SSD services marketing
15 - Intel
- down 10 places
Intel may have suffered in this quarter for having
previously over promised the performance and availability of its much hyped
but unavailable Optane SSD product family. Not so much of what they unveil,
leak or hype about future memory systems is taken as gospel.
big
SSD ideas of 2016,
the future
of memory intensive systems,
processors
in SSDs
16 - NVMdurance
- up 11 places
This is the first time in the Top SSD Companies List for
NVMdurance.
flash endurance
technologies, SSD
controller firmware and IP
17 - BiTMICRO
- up 5 places
rackmount SSDs,
PCIe SSDs,
military SSDs
18 - Virtium
- down 6 places
industrial SSDs,
M.2 SSDs
19 - InnoDisk
- down 1 place
industrial SSDs
20 - Mangstor
- down 5 places
In this quarter Mangstor announced the departure of
its CEO who had been a co-founder of the company.
The company had been
the first to demonstrate ultra low latency across NVMe fabrics (in 2015)
using software which it had written to support its 100 core SSD controller based
PCIe SSDs and racks.
In the following quarter we learned that this kind
of fantastic performance would become less rare due to standardization efforts
and productization of low latency NVMe fabric software from other sources -
notably Excelero. A later casualty of such developments was EMC's DSSD
product line.
PCIe
SSDs, rackmount
SSDs
21 - EMC
- up 4 places
rackmount SSDs
22 - Symbolic
IO - first time appearance in this list
Symbolic IO was still
emerging from stealth and hadn't revealed much upto this quarter. But what the
company did say held out the promise of an entirely new architecture
leveraging persistent memory, processing efficiency and software.
4 shining
SSD companies in 2016 - (editor's cut),
rackmount SSDs
23 - Microsemi
- up 9 places
PCIe
RAM SSDs, SSD
controllers, interface glue
chips
24 - Netlist
- down 7 places
hybrid DIMMs
25 - (tied) - Tegile
Systems - up 3 places
hybrid storage arrays,
rackmount SSDs,
innovative
pricing models
25 - (tied) - Hyperstone - first
time appearance in this list
In the following quarter we learned that
Micron has used Hyperstone's USB 3 SSD controller in the design of a new eUSB
SSD product line aimed at low power, reliable server boot and logging
applications in the IoT market.
SSD controllers,
industrial SSD
market |
 |
Who were the SSD companies just outside this
list?
The next 10 or so companies (listed in ranking order) were:-
|
related reading
who d'you call for the
SSD crystal ball?
the big
market idea of SSD year 2016 (editor's cut)
what were
the big SSD memory architecture ideas in 2016?
Decloaking
hidden and missing market opportunities for enterprise flash | | |
| . |
| It looks like you're seriously interested
in SSDs so if you've got the time - you might also want to take a look at
the home page of StorageSearch.com
which - unlike most home pages - also includes some real content. |
| . |
 |
| . |
|
| |
.... |
|
|
In this quarter 3 companies joined this list for the first time:-
Hyperstone, NVMdurance and SymbolicIO. |
| .. |
 |
.. |
|
|
| .. |
SSD news
SSD history
VCs in SSDs
market research
about the publisher
the Top SSD Companies -
series overview
consolidation
in enterprise flash arrays market
Branding Strategies in
the SSD Market (case studies)
the enterprise
SSD story why's the plot so complicated?
SSD
market self awareness is the only thing which matters
|
.. |
 |
.... |
|
|
.... |
| Pure Storage announced
availability of its of petabyte-scale rackmount SSD - the FlashArray//m - which
in 7U includes 512TB of raw flash delivering 1.5PB of effective capacity (based
on its customer use metrics). |
| SSD news stories in
October 2016 | | |
.... |
 |
.... |
|
|
.... |
 |
.... |
| When all storage is made
from memories the dividing line between storage and memory is much more fluid
than it has been before. And the new philosopher's stone by which alchemy
memory chip arrays are repurposed along this spectrum from one to the other -
raising and lowering the data entropy - is software rather than controller
chips. |
| where are we
heading with memory intensive systems? | | |
.... |
| What's data? - Now hold
on - that's too philosophical. Encode data a different way... to make it work
better - now you're talking engineering. But that's a discussion for another
time. Right here we don't care what the data means. It just comes and goes.
And it's surprising how far or how little it may have traveled. From the
cloud? Another storage device? Maybe it was computed just now from an earlier
matching of data. Sometimes the data arrives in a rush only to sadly discover
that it's not needed after all. There's a lot of data shuffling happening around
the world. Most of it isn't even for you. |
| the interesting
thing? - dataflow controllernomics | | |
.... |
|
|
.... |
Do you remember the movie
Back to the Future?
If you could go back in time and take with you
(not a skateboard) but instead modern memory chips and SSDs (along with
compatible adapters) what impact would that have?
That analysis
leads upto the consideration of back from the future memory ideas and what
their viability could be today. |
| are we ready for
infinitely faster RAM?
| | |
.... |
| In 2016 4 shining
companies - Diablo, Marvell, NVMdurance and Symbolic IO provided
significant technology markers for the way ahead for the SSD memory systems
ecosystem. |
| the big
SSD market lesson from 2016 | | |
.... |
| In the context of strategic
changes in the merchant SSD controller market - all companies face the challenge
that there is only so far that they can go in getting mileage out of innovative
features in standard SSDs.
|
| a winter's tale
of SSD market influences | | |
.... |
| A big incentive for server
makers to engage in NVDIMM wars is that integration with motherboard resources
and firmware promises better lock-in at the customer level because traditionally
end users have been less willing to exercise their freedom to choose 3rd party
competitive suppliers for DIMM components. |
| the road to DIMM
wars | | |
.... |
| Getting acquainted with the
needs of new big data apps |
Editor:- February 13, 2017, 2017 - The nature of
demands on storage and big memory systems has been changing.
A new
slideshare -
the
new storage applications by Nisha Talagala,
VP Engineering at Parallel
Machines provides a strategic overview of the raw characteristics of
dataflows which occur in new apps which involve advanced analytics,
machine learning and deep learning.
It describes how these new
trends differ to legacy enterprise storage patterns and discusses the
convergence of RDBMS and analytics towards continuous streams of enquiries.
And it shows why and where such new demands can only be satisfied by large
capacity persistent memory systems. |
 |
Among the many interesting observations:-
- Quality of service is different in the new apps.
Random access
is rare. Instead the data access patterns are heavily patterned and initiated by
operations in some sort of array or matrix.
- Correctness is hard to measure.
And determinism and repeatability
is not always present for streaming data. Because for example micro batch
processing can produce different results depending on arrival time versus event
time. (Computing the right answer too late is the wrong answer.) Nisha
concludes "Opportunities exist to significantly improve storage and memory
for these use cases by understanding and exploiting their priorities and
non-priorities for data." ...read
the article
SSD software news
where are we
heading with memory intensive systems? | | | |
