November 17, 2010 – You know a storage technology is hot when there are four significant (well, at least interesting) announcements related to that technology in a single day. Such was the case yesterday with announcements related to solid-state disk (SSD) drives from Hitachi GST (in partnership with Intel), LSI, Violin Memory, Anobit and Intel.
Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (GST) claims to be the first hard disk drive (HDD) vendor to ship both SAS and Fibre Channel “enterprise-class” SSDs, albeit in only limited quantities to OEMs, with production shipments ramping over the first half of next year.
See “Hitachi GST enters SSD market.”
LSI announced a PCIe accelerator card based on SSD technology this week, with shipments slated for the end of the month. With 4KB block sizes, LSI claims performance of 240,000 IOPS on sequential reads and 200,000 IOPS on random reads. At an MSRP of $11,500, LSI’s 300GB WarpDrive SPL-300 card isn’t cheap but the company has some cool technology that integrators can bundle, including MegaRAID CacheCade and FastPath software.
See “LSI ships SSD-based accelerator card.”
Violin Memory introduced cache appliances based on flash and DRAM memory that significantly boost the performance of NFS-based NAS systems. The secret sauce in the NFS caching software comes from Violin’s acquisition of Gear6 earlier this year.
See “Violin’s cache appliances accelerate NFS NAS.”
Also yesterday, Anobit announced that it had received $32 million in a funding round led by Intel Capital, Intel’s equity investment unit. That brought the total funding behind Anobit to more than $70 million. Anobit specializes in NAND flash memory and Memory Signal Processing technology.
It’s not surprising that so many vendors are trying to get a piece of the SSD market. Market researcher IDC predicts that the total SSD market will grow at a 58% CAGR in unit shipments and a 44% CAGR in revenues over the next few years.
However, the fastest growing segment of the overall market is enterprise SSDs, where unit shipment are expected to surge at a CAGR of 74%, and revenues are expected to grow at a 54% clip, through 2014.
IDC expects the total SSD market to exceed $7 billion in 2014.
Related article: “Vendor group develops standards for PCIe SSDs”
Showing posts with label Anobit. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Anobit. Show all posts
Wednesday, November 17, 2010
Friday, June 18, 2010
"SSD week" recap
June 18, 2010 – I don’t think it’s purely coincidental, but there was an uncharacteristic amount of rapid-fire announcements related to solid-state disk (SSD) drives this week. Three SSD startups launched (with two based in Israel). There was one SSD-related acquisition. And one vendor trumpeted the now familiar tune, “MLC SSDs are as good as SLC SSDs.”
In short, four interesting SSD announcements in the course of three days. And all four articles covering those announcements made the Most Popular Articles list on infostor.com this week. The industry analysts must be right about increased end-user interest in SSDs, although 39% of infostor.com visitors have no plans for using SSDs because they’re still too expensive (see below).
A quick recap:
At the high end of the announcements, Kaminario launched with the introduction of the K2 (meant to conjure up an image of the mountain, not the skis). See “Startup claims 1.5 million IOPS on RAID array.” An entry-level configuration starts at $200,000 for 300,000 IOPS and 1TB of DRAM, but the system can scale to millions of dollars and IOPS. Since its system is based DRAM technology, Kaminario will compete most directly with vendors such as Texas Memory Systems (which has been selling DRAM devices since disco was popular) and Violin Memory.
Speaking of which, Violin bought Gear6 this week. You might (but probably not) know Gear6 as a supplier of a souped-up Memcached distribution, but that’s not why Violin plucked them. Gear6 also has NFS caching software. If Violin can orchestrate that code into its SSD arrays it will give Violin an entry into the lucrative NAS acceleration market (see “Violin to acquire Gear6 for caching software”).
Anobit (add another bit) was another SSD startup that launched this week, with an MLC-based array that the company says provides the performance and reliability (“endurance” in SSD parlance) of more expensive SLC SSDs. You’ll see a lot of similar claims in the months ahead, as the mathematicians at SSD vendors have come up with a variety of tricks to mask the inherent drawbacks of inexpensive MLC flash NAND technology. Anobit’s secret sauce is its Memory Signal Processing technology (see “Anobit claims MLC SSDs rival SLC SSDs”).
And on the PCIe front, Virident launched its tachIOn SSDs. (Weirdly enough, when you type “tachIOn” in Word it automatically gets changed to “tachyon” which, by the way, is a hypothetical subatomic particle that moves faster than light, although most of us old-timers think of it as a Fibre Channel controller chip). Virident is going head-to-head with Fusion-io, essentially trying to beat them at their own game (see "Virident ships SLC SSDs for PCIe").
Despite the rapidly falling prices of flash memory and SSDs, many end users still say SSDs are too expensive. In an infostor.com QuickVote survey conducted earlier this year, 24% of the respondents had planned to deploy enterprise-class SSDs in the first half of this year; another 26% planned to buy them in the second half of the year; but 49% had no plans to deploy SSDs, with 10% citing insufficient reliability and 39% saying SSDs were still too expensive.
If you’re really interested in SSDs, consider attending the Flash Memory Summit, August 17 – 19 in Santa Clara.
In short, four interesting SSD announcements in the course of three days. And all four articles covering those announcements made the Most Popular Articles list on infostor.com this week. The industry analysts must be right about increased end-user interest in SSDs, although 39% of infostor.com visitors have no plans for using SSDs because they’re still too expensive (see below).
A quick recap:
At the high end of the announcements, Kaminario launched with the introduction of the K2 (meant to conjure up an image of the mountain, not the skis). See “Startup claims 1.5 million IOPS on RAID array.” An entry-level configuration starts at $200,000 for 300,000 IOPS and 1TB of DRAM, but the system can scale to millions of dollars and IOPS. Since its system is based DRAM technology, Kaminario will compete most directly with vendors such as Texas Memory Systems (which has been selling DRAM devices since disco was popular) and Violin Memory.
Speaking of which, Violin bought Gear6 this week. You might (but probably not) know Gear6 as a supplier of a souped-up Memcached distribution, but that’s not why Violin plucked them. Gear6 also has NFS caching software. If Violin can orchestrate that code into its SSD arrays it will give Violin an entry into the lucrative NAS acceleration market (see “Violin to acquire Gear6 for caching software”).
Anobit (add another bit) was another SSD startup that launched this week, with an MLC-based array that the company says provides the performance and reliability (“endurance” in SSD parlance) of more expensive SLC SSDs. You’ll see a lot of similar claims in the months ahead, as the mathematicians at SSD vendors have come up with a variety of tricks to mask the inherent drawbacks of inexpensive MLC flash NAND technology. Anobit’s secret sauce is its Memory Signal Processing technology (see “Anobit claims MLC SSDs rival SLC SSDs”).
And on the PCIe front, Virident launched its tachIOn SSDs. (Weirdly enough, when you type “tachIOn” in Word it automatically gets changed to “tachyon” which, by the way, is a hypothetical subatomic particle that moves faster than light, although most of us old-timers think of it as a Fibre Channel controller chip). Virident is going head-to-head with Fusion-io, essentially trying to beat them at their own game (see "Virident ships SLC SSDs for PCIe").
Despite the rapidly falling prices of flash memory and SSDs, many end users still say SSDs are too expensive. In an infostor.com QuickVote survey conducted earlier this year, 24% of the respondents had planned to deploy enterprise-class SSDs in the first half of this year; another 26% planned to buy them in the second half of the year; but 49% had no plans to deploy SSDs, with 10% citing insufficient reliability and 39% saying SSDs were still too expensive.
If you’re really interested in SSDs, consider attending the Flash Memory Summit, August 17 – 19 in Santa Clara.
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