See also:-
Virident
Systems - editor mentions on StorageSearch.com
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In June 2010 -
Virident Systems
announced the immediate
availability of its tachIOn
- a fast PCIe SSD
using SLC flash
- with 800MB/s sustained R/W throughput, 200K sustained random
IOPS (320K
peak) and capacity options of 200 / 300 / 400GB.
Aimed at the
enterprise acceleration market - the tachIOn's
data intergity
features include end to end error correction.
Endurance is
quoted as 24 years at 5TB writes / day.
In
September 2009
- StorageSearch.com disclosed that search volume for PCIe form factor SSDs had
surpassed that for 2.5"
SSDs for the 1st time something I called - "A tsunami warning event
for SSD vendors addressing the enterprise server acceleration market."
That
lead has been maintained ever since - and that form factor paradigm shift is
cited in Virident's press release today which quotes Jim Handy,
SSD analyst at
Objective
Analysis who said "In a recent study Objective Analysis determined
that the market for high-performance PCI Express SSDs should out-strip the
combined markets for SSDs using all other high-speed interfaces by 2015."
Virident's founder
include Silicon Valley veterans from Google, Sun Microsystems, Cisco,
SGI, and Intel.
It will be interesting to see how Virident's business
approach and routes to market differ from those companies already in this
market...- in particular:-
Fusion-io,
Dolphin and
Texas Memory Systems.
In the
SSD market of
today
marketing skills matter as much as
technology.
In August 2010 -
Virident Systems
announced the signing
of a reseller agreement with
Appro for
Virident's tachIOn drive.
In
November 2010 -
Virident Systems
announced that it has closed
a new round of funding led by Sequoia Capital.
In December
2010 - An article on
SSDperformanceblog.com
discussed the write performance of a Virident tachIOn card which was measured
at various percentages full. The author - Vadim Tkachenko - says "Virident's
card maintains very good throughput level in close to full capacity mode, and
that means you do not need to worry ( or worry less) about space reservation or
formatting card with less space."
In April 2011 -
Virident Systems
announced that
working with SGI they
demonstrated 1 million IOPS performance in a 1U server rack using just 2 of
its tachIOn
PCIe SSDs at a system
list price of less than $.05 per IOPS.
In June 2011 -
Virident Systems
announced that it has been chosen as a winner of the
Red Herring Top
100.
"I am pleased to see the industry recognize the advances
in our storage technology and understand the market opportunity that Virident
has," said Vijay
Karamcheti, co-founder and CTO, who gave the winning presentation at the Red
Herring Top 100 ceremony. "We have an excellent team here, we are backed by
top investors, and we continue to get positive feedback from both customers and
OEMs. It is going to be a great year for us."
In June 2011
-
Virident Systems
was one of several compatible companies named in
FlashSoft's launch of
its auto tiering SSD
software.
In August 2011 - Virident's Director of Systems
Engineering - Shirish Jamthe
presented a paper at the
Flash Memory Summit called -
a
Close Look at PCIe SSDs (pdf) which gives you some idea of their thinking.
In
November 2011 - Virident
Systems
announced
it has completed a $21 million Series C funding bringing its total equity
funding to $50 million. The company also launched its first
MLC based
PCIe SSD - the
FlashMAX MLC - with 1.4TB
RAID protected (7+1)
capacity and 1.4 Million IOPS with 20 microseconds latency. (1TB MSRP
$13,000) |
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| S/e/brand X/LC -
flash wars in enterprise SSDs |
When flash SSDs started to be used as
enterprise server accelerators in 2004 - competing
RAM SSD makers said
flash wasn't reliable
enough.
RAM SSDs had been used for server speedups
since 1976
- and in 2004 they owned the enterprise market. (Before 2004 - flash SSDs
weren't fast enough and had mostly been used as rugged storage in the
military and
industrial
markets - and in space
constrained civilian products such as smartphones.)
By 2007 it was
clear that the endurance
of SLC flash was more than good enough to survive in high
IOPS server
caches. And in the ensuing years the debate about enterprise flash SSDs shifted
to MLC - because when systems integrators put early cheap consumer grade SSDs
into arrays - guess what happened? They burned out within a few months - exactly
as predicted.
Since 2009 new
controller
technologies and the combined market experience of enterprise MLC pioneers
like Fusion-io and
SandForce have
demonstrated that with the right management - MLC can survive in most (but
still not all) fast SSDs.
Now as we head into 1X nanometer flash
generations new technical challenges are arising and MLC SSD makers disagree
about which is the best way to implement enterprise MLC SSDs.
Which
type of so called "enterprise MLC" is best? Can you believe the
contradictory marketing claims? Can you even understand the arguments? (Probably
not.)
And that's why marketing is going to play a bigger part in the
next round of enterprise SSD wars as SSD companies wave their wands and reveal
more about the magic inside their SSD engines to audiences who don't really
understand half of what they're being told. |
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| the 3 fastest PCIe
SSDs? |
Are you trying to shortlist flash SSD accelerators according to
comparative benchmark tests?
If so a new article -
the 3 fastest PCIe
SSDs list (or is it really lists?) may help to take some of the
pressure off you. Hmm... you may be thinking that StorageSearch's editor never
gives easy answers to SSD questions if more complicated ones are available.
|
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But in this case you'd be
wrong. (I didn't say you'd like the answers, though.) ...read the article | | | |
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| Who's who in SSD? |
Editor:- December 2, 2011 - Virident is 1
of more than 40 companies in the
PCIe SSD accelerator
market, has been in the 2 most recent editions of the
top 20 SSD companies
list and is in the
fastest SSDs list
too.
Virident shipped its first PCIe SSDs in
June 2010.
And you might think that maybe the company could mention "PCIe SSDs"
when it comes to rewriting its company profile - instead of that "SCM"
vagary.
It's not uncommon for tech companies to retain an early version
of their company description - written by their founders - as some form of holy
writ - for years after it has ceased to have any valid meaning or connection to
what they do.
When I spoke recently to Shridar Subramanian -
Virident's VP product marketing - the first thing I put to him was - that in
some ways in the past year - the company had given me the impression of
still being mentally rooted partly back in stealth mode.
I had
found it difficult to extract details about the internals of their SSD
architecture so I could share them with my readers (although I had made some
educated guesses).
"That's all going to change now" he said -
because the company had invested a lot more resources into marketing
communications and into writing assets for its web site as part of the work
leading up to the launch of its new
FlashMAX PCIe SSD
family.
To lend weight to my argument about the value of communicating
more openly about SSD architecture - I made the point that the mouse site's
readers are serious minded people and probably included most of the people
they would be trying to reach out to as potential customers.
He laughed
and said - "I've been reading StorageSearch. myself to learn about the SSD
market for many years - even from the time before I joined Virident. So tell
me what you want to know. And I'll get you the information."
And
he was as good as his word - following through with a technical briefing and
tons of follow up material some of which I'm still digesting and which will
appear in other places on this site.
But before going into any of that
- a completely unexpected twist for me was some background which helps to
explain the vague wording in the company's own version of its profile - and
which also helps to explain why some parts of their design are the way they are
today.
He said the first product which Virident designed was a
non volatile module for servers which fitted into regular RAM DIMMs but used
NOR flash managed by their own design of controller.
I said I was
aware that NOR flash had mostly been used in mobile phones but hadn't been
adopted in computer SSDs - which all used NAND.
He said the advantages
of
NOR
compared to NAND at that time were simpler random access and much
faster read latency (about 5x).
The disadvantage of NOR was
slower erase-write.
Despite that, however, Virident had designed a
memory management system which overcame most of the write limitations of the
NOR - and had very good application performance.
But when the
Credit Crunch hit the world economy in 2008 - one of the casualties was the NOR
chip line from Spansion
which Virident had designed into their product. So the company went back to the
drawing board to start again. This time to design a PCIe SSD - and using the
popular SSD market choice of NAND flash.
"But because we had
already solved the problems of slow write performance in the NOR technology our
architecture was giving even better comparative results with NAND."
Shridar
said Virident's goal at the outset was to design a low server footprint
enterprise flash SSD which would give sustained and predictable performance over
the full spectrum of variable loads that occur in storage apps - and wouldn't
drop off a performance cliff when dealing with small vs large blocks, queue
depths, capacity utilization etc.
Here are some of the features:-
- small form factor - 1/2 length, 1/2 height
- skinny
RAM flash cache (tiny amount of on-board RAM) and only 1GB approx of server
RAM used to support 1TB of flash
- big
architecture - the card's controller can keep 256 flash memory chips active
at the same time - doing R/W garbage collection etc.
- legacy
architecture - the product has been designed to operate comfortably with
software that's already out there and doesn't need to be tweaked or rewritten to
work optimally with their product.
- non blocking R/W - due to wide (many parallel data lanes) flash-aware
RAID architecture - to help maintain steady performance.
From my
perspective editing StorageSearch.com - one of the fundamental differences I
see in PCIe SSD companies - even when they market similar sounding products
- is explained by the background and leanings of the founders and
designers.
Are they coming at it from a background in semiconductor
technology, CPU design, software or storage architecture?
It looks
like Virident views itself as being a dependable enterprise storage company.
Its products haven't been adjusted to shine in any particular hand
picked industry benchmarks. They are intended to work steadily and reliably
without fuss or surprises coping year after year with any of the demands which
users' changing needs may throw at them.
We''ll be reading a lot more
about how that positioning stacks up in the months to come. In the
meantime... if you want to read more - you might want to take a look at
my
past mentions of Virident - here on StorageSearch.com and the company's
own white papers etc on
Virident's web
site.
I currently talk to more than 300 makers of SSDs and
another 100 or so companies which are closely enmeshed around the SSD
ecosphere - which are all profiled here on the mouse site.
I learn
about new SSD companies every day, including many in stealth mode. If you're
interested in the growing
big picture of
the SSD market canvass - StorageSearch will help you along the way. Many
SSD company CEOs read our site too - and say they value our thought leading SSD
content - even when we say something that's not always comfortable to hear. I
hope you'll find it it useful too. | | |
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| Virident
hops on MLC bus with 1.4 M IOPS PCIe SSD |
Editor:- November 10, 2011 -
Virident Systems
today
announced
it has completed a $21 million Series C funding led by current investor
Globespan Capital Partners with
strategic investments from
Intel
Capital, Cisco and a storage solutions
provider, along with existing investors Sequoia
Capital and Artiman Ventures
- bringing its total equity funding to $50 million.
Virident also
announced
immediate availability of its first MLC PCIe SSD - the
FlashMAX MLC is a
low-profile form factor module with upto 1.4TB
RAID protected (7+1)
capacity (1TB MSRP $13,000) and delivers over 1.4 Million IOPS with 20
microseconds latency.
Editor's comments:- Virident today
updated its website to include a host of new customer endorsements and
performance data.
The company's positioning is that it aims to provide consistent
enterprise performance (relative to the variables of block size, how full the
SSD is etc) rather than a product which has speed spikes which vary across
dimensions and time. (Attacking older models from
Fusion-io.)
Virident
isn't unique in having spike free flash SSD performance -
Violin's SSDs have
always had it, Texas
Memory Systems's RamSan-70
delivers it too.
Achieving balanced spike-free acceleration in
flash SSDs is done at the
design stage from an optimal mix of
big vs small
architecture, skinny
vs fat cache,
ratio
of over-provisioning,
optimizing the RAID for flash
(for performance and reliability), using fast
controllers and
integration with SSD
virtualization software.
It's a
difficult trick
to get balanced IOPS in flash - unlike in
RAM SSDs where
spike-free performance and symmetry are intrinsic virtues of the
raw memory.
What
will the company do with the new funding?
In the current
SSD market bubble
all PCIe SSD vendors are trying to establish design wins by technical
superiority and market share by revenue growth - but making a profit isn't a
realistic prospect for most of them. |
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So the money will most likely be used to pay
additional new salaries and facilities and keep the show on the road until
the next review point - which in Virident's case could be another round of
funding, IPO, or - more likely in my view - getting acquired. | | | |
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