| SSD Guide
Maintains Momentum |
Editor:- July 1, 2009 -
pageviews of the
SSD buyers guide
in June were 61% higher than a year ago.
Listings of the most
popular subjects and articles can be seen, as usual, on the
storage market research
page.
My new article on the
SSD Notebook
market is only 2 weeks old - but already in the top 20 articles viewed this
month.
Looking ahead to July -
StorageSearch.com will publish a
new directory for
MRAM.
This is a market which has been in the so-called "emerging" state for
more than a decade. But due to the low capacity of commercially available
products, its use has been restricted to embedded markets in which no other
technology can do the job - such as car crash recorders in which the write speed
of flash is too slow, and
high mechanical forces have precluded the use of battery backed
RAM.
The big
bucks lure of the flash
SSD market has gotten the attention of MRAM developers. They're waking up to
the industry changing possibilities that could occur if they can deliver higher
capacity products. Over the next few years - this is one of several non volatile
memory technologies we'll be talking about more. |
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The 9th quarterly edition of
the the Top 10 SSD OEMs
will be published after the holiday on July 7. That's got a big surprise in it
- which you'll see when it's published. It will reveal a lot about the changing
currents in the market - and the upwards (and downwards) shifts in SSD search
affinity. | | |
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| Adaptec
Ships Flash Cache Backup for RAID Controllers |
Editor:- June 24, 2009 -
Adaptec today
announced the availability of
flash
backup options for its
SATA/SAS RAID controllers.
Adaptec's
Zero-Maintenance Cache Protection protects data stored in controller cache for
up to 10 years with no installation, monitoring, maintenance, disposal or
replacement costs unlike lithium batteries. |
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| Crossing
the T's in STEC's SWOT |
Editor:- June 22, 2009 - an
article published today in EnterpriseStorageForum.com
poses the question -
Can
SSD Maker STEC Be Stopped?
As far as it goes - it makes some good points. But if you're
going to publish a
SWOT analysis
for STEC (or indeed any
other SSD company) you need a far deeper understanding of the currents swirling
around in the SSD market.
Because STEC's future success seems to be tied heavily to oems who use
its products in the server acceleration market, the main factors which
threaten that success are - in my view - the following:-
- PCI express SSD
market.
While it's not intuitively obvious that PCIe SSDs compete head
to head with 2.5" SSDs
- the reality is they do. The growing search volume for PCIe SSDs - which
StorageSearch.com has been tracking in the past year indicates that PCIe SSDs
will be the main factor which limits the size and acceptance of DAS connected
small form factor SSDs in the server box.
- Outside the server box - in the
rackmount SSD
space - the market has moved beyond the traditional
RAM versus Flash
SSDs debate.
The new debate here is how the market will split
between the 2 main options:-
.
- proprietary flash SSDs (such as those made by
Texas Memory Systems,
and Violin Memory).
.
- arrays of Commercial Off The Shelf flash SSDs - such as those marketed
by EMC and
Sun Microsystems (who both
oem STEC's SSDs). But another scope for fragmentation within the COTS space
itself is the appearance of rackmount SSD arrays populated by COTS PCIe SSDs
such as Dolphin and
NextIO.
As
I have discussed in previous articles - I expect all these various
architectural forms to grow and prosper - rather than for any clear winners
to emerge in the near future. That's because users have widely different
profiles with respect to performance needs and risk tolerance - which no single
technology or vendor fits most economically.
- Inside the 2.5" SSD market itself - there are many emerging point
products which can threaten STEC from a performance point of view.
Instead
I think the biggest 2.5" SSD threat comes from STEC's customers designing
their own SSDs (if they perceive that the small form factor SSD is indeed the
way they want to go). With more than
20 chip companies
offering the bits and pieces needed to design SSDs - and with the option of
mixing and matching acquisitions
with internal and external technology
it's getting easier
to design your own SSD. The advantage to big server oems doing this - is
that they can tailor products which meet their exact needs - and add unique
features which can't be easily copied by their systems competitors. That's a
much bigger threat to STEC than its customers than them buying SSDs from
companies using SandForce's
controller (which was mentioned in the ESF article). To keep this
analysis short - I haven't gone into internal business factors such as cash
flow, logistics and supply chains. Any of these coming under stress could
impact STEC's ability to service increasing demands from its customers (even
without the external competitive threats listed above.) As you can see - the
picture and outlook for STEC (or any other SSD company) is far from clear and
certain. The market will decide - once it has absorbed and processed the
confusing range of
SSD choices on offer. |
 |
One useful way to see which
SSD companies are getting more interest or less interest from customers in the
market is to analyze changes in the quarterly
top 10 SSD companies
published by StorageSearch.com. The next edition will be published July 7. | | |
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SSD Bookmarks
suggested
by - Woody Hutsell, President Texas Memory Systems |
Here's an article written by or
about Texas Memory Systems
Flash SSD Reliability (pdf)
Woody
Hutsell says he chose this article because Flash reliability is a topic of great
interest right now, and this paper approaches the subject in a unique and very
readable manner, starting at the chip level and working up through the board
level all the way to the enterprise architecture perspective.
Other SSD article suggestions...
Woody Hutsell says - "As
you know, the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) started a new group
last summer, called the Solid State Storage Initiative (SSSI). This new
organization has the ambitious goal of becoming a major advocacy group for solid
state storage. SSSI is starting to publish
research
papers on solid state storage topics. The first one,
Solid State
Storage 101 (pdf), is interesting for the fact that it is the outcome of a
collaboration between many companies who, in most other settings, would be
serious competitors."
Other SSD bookmark suggestions...
StatspackAnalyzer - is a website
where IT professionals can paste their Oracle statspacks or AWR reports and get
analyses and recommendations for storage performance improvements. (It's free to
use but registration is required.)
Woody Hutsell says he
recommends this bookmark because - "A key ingredient to greater SSD
adoption is a better understanding within the user communities of just how
important storage performance is to mission success. StatspackAnalyzer.com isn't
a large website, but it does have some information, a forum, and even the entire
Analyzer rules list available for comment and improvement."
Editor:- thanks Woody for sharing your SSD links.
see also:-
Texas
Memory Systems - editor mentions on StorageSearch.com | | |
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