| Year |
the Top SSD
Companies
links to all past editions |
Key changes
in each edition |
| 2018 |
Top 10 SSD Companies -
2018 Q2 |
This edition anticipates the series finale and
explains the need for a new list to help readers identify companies of interest
in the next phase of disruptive memoryfication. |
|
| Top 20 SSD Companies -
2018 Q1 |
Excelero's first appearance in this
list. |
|
| 2017 |
Top 25 SSD Companies -
2017 Q4 |
Everspin, IP-Maker and
Viking made
their first appearances in this list.
NGD Systems became the
new #1 most researched SSD company.
|
|
|
|
Top 25 SSD Companies -
2017 Q1 |
Silicon Motion
and SMART HRS
made their first appearances in this list. |
|
| 2016 |
Top 25 SSD Companies -
2016 Q4 |
Hyperstone, NVMdurance and SymbolicIO all
made their first appearances in this list. |
|
| Top 25 SSD Companies -
2016 Q3 |
Mangstor made
its first appearance in this list. |
|
| Top 25 SSD Companies -
2016 Q2 |
Pure Storage
became the new #1 most researched SSD company.
"This is the culmination of many long term strategic trends - all
of which were pointing towards the answer that until we reach a point of less
disruptive change and greater stability which is still some years in the future
- that in today's changing enterprise market it is the rackmount SSD companies
(including cloud) and systems architecture and software which are the only
optimal scale in which to design, integrate, and sell SSD everywhere solutions
as a business brand." |
|
| Top 25 SSD Companies -
2016 Q1 |
Memblaze, Netlist and NxGn made their
first appearances in this list.
"Violin and Pure were both tied
at #2 in this quarter. But Violin's revenue picture was somewhat different to
Pure's in this period. (Pure's revenue was 14x higher than Violin's.) Violin's
quarterly revenue in early 2016 was about half what it was in 2012 (the year
before going public). Given that Violin's product line uses proprietary
controllers some of the fascination with Violin is that it is still surviving." |
|
| 2015 |
Top 25 SSD Companies -
2015 Q4 |
Pure Storage
joined the top 3 companies in the list for the first time.
"This
is the best ever ranking for Pure Storage in the history of this series (which
was tracking enterprise flash array market leaders for years before Pure was
founded.) I think that part of the mood leading to this high degree of interest
in Pure was curiosity as to whether the (recently public) company's results
would show that there was a new type of flash based business miracle to be
revealed by a company which didn't have its own flash technology and had already
told investors in its IPO documents that its ratio of customers to employees was
close to an unsustainable 1 on 1." |
|
| Top 25 SSD Companies -
2015 Q3 |
SanDisk became the
new #1 most researched SSD company.
Micron reached its
highest rank (so far) in the history of this series.
"this has
been a long journey for SanDisk and for the SSD industry as the tides of market
change have been washing away the previous best beauty spots and redefining the
SSD landscape with an impersonal power which resembles lunar forces." |
|
| Top 25 SSD Companies -
2015 Q2 |
Primary Data
made its first appearance in this list.
"The SSD everywhere
ecosystem is a strange kind of creature which has emerged as sufficiently big in
scope to deserve its own (new dynasty) thinking as the only viable way forward
and indeed the endgame - instead of merely being a collaborative vehicle to
improve the ride for data safaris which were designed long ago with entirely
different raw technology components in mind." |
|
| Top 25 SSD Companies -
2015 Q1 |
Cactus Technologies
made its first appearance in this list.
"the final phase of
fattening the SSD vendor count (battle of the bulge) will occur because many of
the products needed to enable the transition to a more user-friendly and
competitive consolidated market will come from new companies and entirely new
product types which only exist today in embryonic forms." |
|
| 2014 |
Top 25 SSD Companies -
2014 Q4 |
InnoDisk made its
first appearance in this list.
"This quarter recorded Micron's
highest rank so far in the history of this series. Micron stood out for me in
2014 for not having acquired any significant SSD companies. Another thing which
stood out for me was that because Micron doesn't have the type of strong sticky
controller architecture and SSD software which would make it easy to lock-in
customers and bypass many of the SSD companies it supplies to - Micron is a less
threatening flash partner for many enterprise SSD companies to work with." |
|
| Top 25 SSD Companies -
2014 Q3 |
Diablo became the new
#1 most researched SSD company.
PLDA made its first
appearance in this list.
"New SSD based software will demolish
many limits you thought were set in concrete - such as the size of server memory
and the restrictions of how you can redeploy and migrate data which is siloed in
different legacy systems." |
|
| Top 25 SSD Companies -
2014 Q2 |
PLX Technology and
Microsemi
made their first appearances in this list.
"In this quarter
SanDisk conclusively demonstrated the scale of its ambitions in enterprise flash
by agreeing to acquire acquire Fusion-io for approximately $1.1 billion." |
|
| Top 25 SSD Companies -
2014 Q1 |
Maxta and A3CUBE made their first
appearances in this list. |
|
| 2013 |
Top 25 SSD Companies -
2013 Q4 |
In this edition the shape of the bulge at the
very top of the list changed.
Tegile and Virtium - made their
first appearances in this list.
"In this quarter - LSI launched
the most ambitious design of single chip SSD controller in the history of the
SSD market - which I described as having the aspiration of - SSD market on a
chip". |
|
| Top 25 SSD Companies -
2013 Q3 |
HGST and Diablo Technologies
made their first appearances in this list.
"This period - the 26th
quarter in this series - was characterized even more than before by the theme of
SSD company acquisitions." |
|
| Top 25 SSD Companies -
2013 Q2 |
8 of the top 10 companies now market
rackmount SSDs.
"Just
after the quarter ended - SanDisk announced an agreement to acquire SMART
Storage. In the 24 hours which followed that announcement - the search spike
for SMART in our readership temporarily shot it up to the #2 most searched SSD
company." |
|
| Top 25 SSD Companies -
2013 Q1 |
Greenliant Systems
and Marvell Technology
made their first appearances in this list.
"It's tempting to focus
just on success stories. But for every SSD company which climbs the rankings
inevitably another drops down." |
|
| 2012 |
Top 25 SSD Companies -
2012 Q4 |
Pure Storage
made its first appearance in this list - having been a near miss in the previous
quarter.
"One of the frustrations for Skyera, however, is that
demonstrating reliability and apps compatibility as a newcomer to the mission
critical systems market - can't be rushed." |
|
| Top 25 SSD Companies -
2012 Q3 |
Fastest climber was Skyera - up 14
places.
KingSpec
made its first appearance in this list.
"The big deal for TMS
watchers in this quarter was that the privately owned company which has been at
the fast end of the SSD market since 1978 - was being acquired by IBM." |
|
| Top 25 SSD Companies -
2012 Q2 |
2 companies went straight from exiting stealth
mode into the list:- DensBits
and
Skyera.
Also
2 longer established companies - Kaminario and KingFast - made
their first appearances in this list.
I asked Fusion-io to reveal what
they were doing to implement DSP IP inside flash SSDs? Fusion declined to
answer. (2 years later Fusion-io lagged competitors in its support of 19nm
flash..)
I rhetorically asked - Can Violin sustain its lead in the
rackmount market? - because I said - It will get more difficult as the
rackmount SSD market itself
fragments
more clearly into different
types of products. |
|
|
|
Top 20 SSD OEMs - 2012
Q1 |
Anobit (acquired by
Apple) made its first appearance in the top 20 list.
"In
this quarter - SanDisk acquired FlashSoft - one of the leading independent
software vendors in the SSD ASAPs market." |
|
| 2011 |
Top 20 SSD OEMs - 2011
Q4 |
WhipTail made its
first appearance in the top 20 list.
"Every single company in
the top 10 has its own proprietary SSD controller IP and architecture... We
haven't gotten to the stage where the color or the brand on the SSD box
determines how many get sold. Nevertheless some brands are now firmly associated
with particular concepts." |
|
|
|
Top 20 SSD OEMs - 2011
Q3 |
FlashSoft and Nimbus made their
first appearances in the top 20 list.
IO Turbine would
have done so too - if it hadn't been acquired during the qualifying quarter by
Fusion-io. |
|
|
|
Top 20 SSD OEMs - 2011
Q2 |
Pliant made its
first appearance at the top 10 end of the list - in the same quarter in which
it got acquired by SanDisk.
Virident Systems
also entered the list for the first time. |
|
|
|
Top 20 SSD OEMs - 2011
Q1 |
Kove entered the list
for the first time. |
|
| 2010 |
Top 20 SSD OEMs -
2010 Q4 |
SMART and LSI entered the
list for the first time. |
|
|
|
Top 20 SSD OEMs -
2010 Q3 |
As the list was expanded to 20 SSD companies -
readers got better visibility of the changing rankings for companies like Pliant and Seagate. |
|
|
|
Top 10 SSD OEMs -
2010 Q2 |
OCZ entered the list
for the first time. |
|
|
|
Top 10 SSD OEMs -
2010 Q1 |
Micron and PhotoFast entered
the list for the first time. |
|
| 2009 |
Top 10 SSD OEMs -
2009 Q4 |
Fusion-io unveiled
details of a very fast PCIe form factor,
InfiniBand SSD for "government
customers" and revealed that Samsung had become an
investor. |
|
|
|
Top 10 SSD OEMs - 2009
Q3 |
StorageSearch.com
disclosed that more
PCIe SSDs had
passed 2.5" SSDs
in reader search popularity.
"This is a tsunami warning event for SSD vendors in the
enterprise server acceleration market" said editor
Zsolt Kerekes in
a news alert
September 24, 2009.
Foremay entered the
list for the first time. |
|
|
|
Top 10 SSD OEMs - 2009
Q2 |
SandForce entered
the list for the first time. First appearance of a company whose primary
business was designing SSD
controllers. |
|
|
|
Top 10 SSD OEMs - 2009
Q1 |
Fusion-io was #1 -
announced deal with
HP and coming on-board of - Steve Wozniak.
PureSilicon entered
the list for the first time on news it was sampling the world's first standard
height terabyte 2.5" SSD.
RunCore entered the
list for the first time.
|
|
| 2008 |
Top 10 SSD OEMs - 2008
Q4 |
Intel and Solidata entered the
list for the first time.
An article in a gaming magazine showed that
Memoright's 2.5" SATA SSDs performed substantially faster in some
benchmarks than supposedly "headline spec faster" devices from Intel.
Samsung publicly withdrew its offer to buy SanDisk.
Texas Memory Systems announced it had installed a 20TB flash SSD
system with 1 million random read IOPS at an unnamed customer location.
|
|
|
|
Top 10 SSD OEMs - 2008
Q3 |
Fusion-io entered
the list for the first time.
Texas Memory Systems announced the
RamSan-440 - a 600,000 IOPS 4U rackmount RAM SSD with 512GB capacity and latency
of less than 15 microseconds. A revolutionary advance was the use of internal
flash SSD backup and a feature called Instant-On I/O. That means multi terabyte
RAM SSDs start working after a power failure orders of magnitude faster than
earlier products which used HDD backup.
|
|
|
|
Top 10 SSD OEMs - 2008
Q2
"To be frank - using revenue based reports to guide your
way ahead in a fast growing market like SSDs is about as sensible as driving
fast and steering ahead by what you see in the rear view mirror." |
Memoright was #1
having shipped the fastest 2.5" SATA flash SSD family available during
most of this quarter.
Seagate filed suit against STEC alleging patent
infringements related to hard disk interfaces. STEC dismissed the claims.
|
|
|
|
Top 10 SSD OEMs - 2008
Q1 |
STEC said it would be
supplying its SSDs on an "exclusive" basis for use in EMC's
Symmetrix DMX-4 following a disasterous revenue quarter.
Toshiba entered the list
for the first time.
STEC announced it would be supplying its SSDs on an
"exclusive" basis for use in EMC's Symmetrix DMX-4. |
|
| 2007 |
Top 10 SSD OEMs - 2007
Q4 |
BiTMICRO was #1. Memoright entered
the list for the first time.
BiTMICRO announced plans to sample a
terabyte class (1.6TB) 3.5" 4Gbps FC flash SSD in Q108. |
|
|
|
Top 10 SSD OEMs - 2007
Q3 |
SanDisk was #1. Violin Memory entered
the list for the first time.
STEC's one time position as the oem with
the fastest (announced) flash SSDs for the enterprise server market was severely
dented by announcements of significantly faster flash SSD products from several
newcomers to this market segment including Fusion-io and Texas Memory Systems.
|
|
|
|
Top 10 SSD OEMs - 2007
Q2
start of a new series |
STEC was #1.
8 out of the top 10 made HDD form factor SSDs.
SiliconSystems received
a patent for its PowerArmor technology.
Today (July 2007) there are
over 55 active listed SSD oems. ...I expect the total number of SSD oems to go
north of 100 in 2008.
The new storage gold rush is chasing an
opportunity for storage systems companies that could eventually be worth 5 to 10
billion dollars a year. And this is a market in which the usual suspects - EMC,
IBM, HP are nowhere. So in theory anyone could end up dominating this market. |
