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Toshiba milestones from recent
SSD Market
History
In May 2008 -
Toshiba acquired
approximately $30 million of shares in
Mtron.
In
September 2008 - Toshiba sampled a 256GB 2.5" SATA MLC flash SSD
with R/W speeds of 120 / 70 MB/s.
In December 2008 -
Toshiba said it will
sample a new family of MLC flash SSDs with 256GB capacity in 2.5" and
128GB capacity in 1.8" form factors in Q1 2009.
In January
2009 - Toshiba
announced it will start volume production of dual port
SAS SLC flash SSDs in
Q2 2009. The 2.5" SSDs
will have 100GB capacity, and 25,000 read IOPS, and 20,000 write IOPS. One of
the enabling factors for the high write IOPS is the use of a non-volatile cache
- which was predicted in StorageSearch.com's article -
the Flash SSD Performance
Roadmap. This brings the number of oems who have announced SAS SSDs to 6.
See SSD Buyers
Guide table for the full list.
In May 2009 -
Toshiba announced it is
offering 512GB
SSDs as an option in notebooks for the Japanese market. The new,
Toshiba-developed 512GB SSD employs a 2-bit-per-cell
MLC flash memory -
which gives 4x the capacity of SLC flash used in industrial and
enterprise SSDs for the same silicon wafer footprint. One of the
failures of the SSD
market in 2008 was the low performance of SSDs integrated in notebooks.
Toshiba's new notebook seems to address that market failure . The company says
its new SSD controller
boosts data throughput figures of 230MB/s reads and 180MB/s writes.
In
September 2009 - A report in DIGITIMES said
that Toshiba has
ordered flash memory card controllers from ITE Tech to diversify its
supplier base.
In January 2010 -
Toshiba
announced
it is sampling 128GB mSATA MLC SSD modules (30mm x 50.95mm x 4.75mm ) aimed
at the netbook
PC market. Sequential R/W speeds are 180MB/s and 70MB/s respectively. Weight
is 9g.
In April 2010 -
Violin Memory announced
it had
received
a significant investment from
Toshiba.
In April
2011 - Toshiba
announced it was sampling
SmartNAND
- 24nm flash memory chips (with upto 64GB capacity) with integrated ECC
controllers to simplify the design of consumer products which need storage.
In
January 2013 - Toshiba
started sampling a new range of 2.5"
SAS MLC SSDs - with
self encrypting security
features and on board
sanitization. |
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| Toshiba samples encrypted
SAS SSD |
| Editor:- January 6, 2013 - Toshiba
says
it's sampling a new range of 2.5"
SAS MLC SSDs - with
self encrypting security
features and on board
sanitization.
The PX02SMQ/U has upto 1.6TB capacity. | | |
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| Toshiba nudges Violin's
late entry into PCIe SSD market |
Editor:- March 4, 2013 - Violin is entering the
market for PCIe SSDs.
Its new
Velocity
PCIe Memory Cards range have
regular RAM caches
and are available in 3 physical sizes.
- Low profile - 1.37TB raw capacity, 110K
IOPS (70:30
R/W)
- Full height, half length - upto 5.5TB raw capacity, upto 250K IOPS
- Full height - upto 11TB raw (8TB usable) capacity, upto 500K IOPS
Editor's
comments:- in October
2012 - I wrote that Violin's lack of a PCIe SSD card product line was a
serious business weakness - which limited their accessible revenue in the
enterprise SSD market.
This product gap would have been an important
scoring factor in any potential company assessing Violin's value as an
acquisition.
It was one of several significant reasons why
Texas Memory Systems
(acquired by
IBM) looked like a much
more attractive acquisition candidate in the early part of last year than
Violin - even though both companies had market-leading
big controller
SSD architectures - and despite Violin having sought acquisition much
longer.
Violin's lack of a PCIe SSD product line till now was a serious
misjudgement of the opportunities
for its technology in the enterprise SSD market and not due to any technical
defficiencies. The company's first SSD racks launched in
August 2007
(the Violin 1010 Memory
Appliance) had - in fact - been launched with PCIe interfaces.
How
will Violin's late entry into the PCIe SSD card / module market impact
competitors?
The established leaders in this market space are:-
Fusion-io,
Texas Memory Systems,
Virident and
OCZ (and another 35 or so
companies are listed on our
PCIe SSD page). One
more company in this market mix won't make any material difference to sales
forecasts - even if that newcomer is Violin. Instead it will mean that the
fuzzy edge of users' vendor shortlists will appear sharper - and companies
which shouldn't have been in these lists in the first place will drop out. (But
they wouldn't have been the ones who got the business anyway. There are a lot of
different specialized types of PCIe SSDs - and
just because they may
look the same on the outside - doesn't mean they compete equally for the same
apps slots.)
My guess is that Violin's new products will be most
attractive to companies which already like its rackmounts - and who were already
looking for a more complete single supplier solution around which to hang their
software.
So I anticipate that customers in the big web economy and
SSD dark matter users
will predominate early demand for these new products. And - for any server
companies which haven't yet acquired their own enterprise SSD IP - Violin (the
company) will now look more attractive too.
In a
press
release later today:- we learned that the final stimulus which nudged
Violin tipping into the PCIe SSD market may have been:- hints, inducements
and probably pressure from investor, memory supplier and wannabe-bigger-in-SSD
partner - Toshiba.
See
also:- my classic article -
if Fusion-io sells
more - does that mean Violin will sell less? | | |
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