November 18, 2009 – I don’t invest in storage-specific vendors’ stocks, but if I did I’d be taking a close look at the solid-state disk (SSD) drive arena; in particular, a vendor that seems to be the early leader in this space, at least as measured in terms of OEM design wins: STEC.
This company is on a roll, having racked up design wins with most of the major disk array vendors, including Compellent, EMC, Fujitsu, HP, Hitachi Data Systems, IBM, LSI/Engenio, Sun and others.
The company hosted an Analyst Day earlier this week in NYC, where it announced/previewed a number of new products, including a third-generation ZeusIOPS drive with multi-level cell (MLC) technology (in qualification now), a SATA version of its Mach SSD (2Q10), and Fibre Channel and SAS SSDs based on ASICs. (The Fibre Channel versions of the Zeus SSDs were previously based on field-programmable gate arrays, or FPGAs).
At the Analyst Day conference, STEC officials identified the company’s primary competitors in the enterprise SSD space as Hitachi/Intel (mid-2010), Pliant (2010), Toshiba/Fujitsu (2011/12), Fusion-io (on servers) and, eventually, disk drive manufacturers such as Seagate and Western Digital.
“With six- to nine-month+ qualification cycles, the top slots at OEMs will be filled early, making it a horse race to see who can be second to STEC at most OEMs,” wrote Needham & Co. analyst Richard Kugele in a research note on STEC’s Analyst Day presentations. “ . . .we (and STEC) expect second sourcing to be at the company level rather than the product level, with specific SKUs devoted to certain suppliers due to the lack of [SSD] standards and interoperability.”
Not surprisingly, financial analysts have extremely optimistic stock price expectations for STEC.
For more information on solid-state disk drives, visit InfoStor’s SSD Topic Center.
On a somewhat related note, Adaptec and Intel will be hosting a webinar tomorrow (Thursday, Nov. 19) at 2 p.m. ET “to discuss how data center managers, system integrators, and storage and server OEMs can seamlessly integrate SSDs to reduce IT costs, reduce power consumption and minimize maintenance costs and physical space requirements, all with maximum I/O performance.”
You can register for the webinar here.
Showing posts with label SSDs. Show all posts
Showing posts with label SSDs. Show all posts
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Monday, March 30, 2009
SSDs: WD acquires SilconSystems
March 30, 2009 – As further evidence that solid-state disk (SSD) drives may actually live up to their hype, Western Digital today announced its acquisition of SiliconSystems, for a reasonable $65 million in cash. SiliconSystems specializes in SSDs for embedded systems.
According to Western Digital, embedded SSDs accounted for approximately one-third (or about $400 million) of the total revenues for SSDs last year. SiliconSystems’ strengths have been in the communications, industrial equipment, medical, aerospace and military markets, and investors in the company include Samsung and SanDisk.
It was no secret that SATA drive specialist WD was planning to increase its presence in the enterprise space, but its next anticipated move was expected to be Fibre Channel and/or SAS drives. WD could still make those moves, but an (inexpensive) acquisition that jump starts the company into the nascent market for enterprise-class SSDs (as well as SSDs for markets such as “netbooks”) seems like a prescient power play.
In addition to the fact that Samsung and SanDisk are investors in SiliconSystems, it’s interesting to note that the company was founded by a former STEC executive. STEC is the early market leader in the enterprise SSD space, having locked up (exclusive for now) OEM wins with big guns such as EMC, Hitachi Data Systems, Sun, and others. It’s unlikely that those big guns will stick with a single supplier for SSDs, so WD’s entry into the market gives it a shot at second-source deals with some of those vendors.
Assuming that SSD manufacturers and their OEMs can get SSD prices down to a point that end users will actually start buying them, the SSD battle could prove very interesting over the next year.
In other SSD-related news today, startup Pliant Technology announced $15 million in Series C funding. Pliant sells Enterprise Flash Drives (EFDs) based on SSD technology and the SAS interface, which it began shipping to OEMs late last year.
For more information on SSDs, visit our SSD Topic Center
According to Western Digital, embedded SSDs accounted for approximately one-third (or about $400 million) of the total revenues for SSDs last year. SiliconSystems’ strengths have been in the communications, industrial equipment, medical, aerospace and military markets, and investors in the company include Samsung and SanDisk.
It was no secret that SATA drive specialist WD was planning to increase its presence in the enterprise space, but its next anticipated move was expected to be Fibre Channel and/or SAS drives. WD could still make those moves, but an (inexpensive) acquisition that jump starts the company into the nascent market for enterprise-class SSDs (as well as SSDs for markets such as “netbooks”) seems like a prescient power play.
In addition to the fact that Samsung and SanDisk are investors in SiliconSystems, it’s interesting to note that the company was founded by a former STEC executive. STEC is the early market leader in the enterprise SSD space, having locked up (exclusive for now) OEM wins with big guns such as EMC, Hitachi Data Systems, Sun, and others. It’s unlikely that those big guns will stick with a single supplier for SSDs, so WD’s entry into the market gives it a shot at second-source deals with some of those vendors.
Assuming that SSD manufacturers and their OEMs can get SSD prices down to a point that end users will actually start buying them, the SSD battle could prove very interesting over the next year.
In other SSD-related news today, startup Pliant Technology announced $15 million in Series C funding. Pliant sells Enterprise Flash Drives (EFDs) based on SSD technology and the SAS interface, which it began shipping to OEMs late last year.
For more information on SSDs, visit our SSD Topic Center
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