"We just made the
first tri-state DRAM chip in the world. For the same capacity DRAM chip, with
using our patented technologies, we could reduce the memory array area up to
36%, we could reduce the power consumption up to 40%, we could also increase the
chip access speed."

Among other things in this article Wu cautions
readers about the limitations of encrypted SSDs...

"As strong as
the 256-bit AES encryption is on encrypted SSDs, it only protects data at rest,
i.e., when the system is turned off. To protect data in flight,
data-loss-prevention (DLP) techniques, use of secure communication protocols,
and other measures must be taken." ...read
the article

...

"When calculating cost v performance, its clear that flash is not the
luxury technology that some people believe it to be. Rather it is actually the
most cost effective option for performance-critical applications. Quite simply
flash will save you money."

A strategic lesson to guide future designers is that even
while getting a 50% power consumption reduction (due to flash as RAM) it
is also feasible to increase application performance at the same time because
the software can work with a larger memory capacity (due to the lower
cost of flash
bytes).

Among other things Hunglin says - "With FLC,
better performance can be achieved by reporting to the operating system a larger
than physically implemented main memory. The operating system is thus less
likely to kill background apps, which is why the fast app switching is possible.
The FLC hardware does all the heavy lifting in the background and frees up the
tasks of the operating system." ...read
the article

...

"If you've recently
been on the acquired side of an acquisition send me your best advice. I'd love
some words of wisdom for myself and to be able to share with my team."

Editor:- May 9, 2016 - Companies in the
industrial SSD
market have been saying in recent years that IoT is a market which could
provide a business boost for size and power constrained storage technologies.
But when new systems go to market their design origins can be almost
unrecognizable.

One
sounds more natural while the other sounds forced but more accurately
paints the picture. But I'm not going to agonize over it any longer. And just
to be clear. I myself don't enter competitions. So your field is clear (of
mice anyway).

...

an SSD way
of looking at hard drives

Editor:- May 4, 2016 - In an ironic twist of fate
- it looks as though hard drive vendors may find it useful to characterize some
aspects of HDDs in a way which can be easily related to value judgement numbers
created for SSDs.

For 9 years the Top SSD Companies has been one of the most popular articles here
on the mouse site. You may ask - is it still needed?

The answer is
yes. Despite the number of big
acquisitions in
the SSD market in recent years - we're still on the last stretches of an upward
ramp of vendors in the SSD market because of new opportunities being created by
changes which are necessary and predictable before we get to the kind of
standardized product roles and ecosystem which will lead to a
collapse
in distinct brands needed to sustain the market. ...read the articlePure's CEO says his legacy systems competitors are 2-3 years
behind in flash/cloud centric software

Editor:- May 26, 2016 -
Pure Storage
reported that revenue for its recent quarter was approx $140 million, up 89%
from the year ago period.

In
his
blog
which recaps business highlights CEO - Scott Dietzen - comments
on the nature of the competition he sees from legacy storage companies.

He
says - "In our view, refurbished mechanical disk-era designs from the last
century cannot fulfill the needs of the modern data center: solid-state flash
memory and cloud demand a holistic rethink. Yet the majority of FlashArray's and
all of FlashBlade's competition comes from pre-cloud disk-centric retrofits..."
...read
the article memory intensive data architecture emerges in a new family of
latency roled boxes - unstealthed by Symbolic IO

Editor:- May 25,
2016 - 1 petabyte usable storage in 2U along with a
flash backed RAM
rich server family which uses patented CPU level aware cache-centric data
reduction to deliver high compute performance are among the new offerings
unveiled
today by Symbolic IO
which has emerged from stealth mode.

Founder & CEO, Symbolic IO -
Brian Ignomirello,
said - "This industry hasn't really innovated in more than 20 years, even
the latest offerings based on flash have limitations that cannot be overcome.
Our goal at Symbolic IO was to completely redefine and rethink the way computing
architectures work. We've completely changed how binary is handled and
reinvented the way it's processed, which goes way beyond the industry's current
excitement for hyper-conversion."

Giving a clue to
performance Ignomirello said - "One of our early tests, allows us to
run a full cable class content delivery network over 80+ nodes, while streaming
80+ full-featured movies simultaneously on one channel and requires less than 8%
of the CPU capacity and we had plenty of headroom to run more. IRIS
(Intensified RAM Intelligent Server) is 10,000 times faster than today's flash."

Editor's
comments:- I hadn't spoken with Symbolic IO (when I wrote this) but my
first impression was that the company is in line with at least 3 strategic
trends that you've been reading about on StorageSearch.com in recent years:-

From the marketing point of view it's interesting to see that
in its launch press release Symbolic IO positions itself in the
DIMM Wars
context in this way "IRIS... is 10 times faster than 3D XPoint."

Symbolic
IO says the new systems will be start to become generally available in late Q4
2016.

From an
enterprise
segmentation viewpoint the IRIS systems will be proprietary. There is space
for such approaches in the future market consolidation roadmap because not
everyone needs the fastest performance. But many
webscale SSD companies
are already using data reduction techniques for their own utilizations and
acceleration purposes.

The new thing - if there is a new thing - is
that Symbolic IO will make available boxes which incorporate modern data
architectures from a single source.

Although like all new systems
companies they'll have to wade their way through the apps accreditation and
compatibility lists before their revenues create any ripples - an adoption
dampening factor I wrote about in my 2013 article
Scary Skyera.

For enterprise SATA SSDs, unit growth compared to
the previous quarter was 5%, while SAS and PCIe saw higher growth at
6.7% and 16.3%, respectively.

Editor's comments:-
In Q1 2016 SSD shipments reported by TrendFocus were 30 million units.
Compare this to Q1 2014 for which period TrendFocus reported
15
million units. This shows SSD shipments over all markets have doubled in 2
years.

Editor:- May 17, 2016
- IBM today
announced
that its researchers have demonstrated reliable operation of 3 bits per cell PCM
in a low capacity test rig using 90nm CMOS technology.

Editor's
comments:- in the flash
memory market each doubling capacity transition in a single cell
(first from SLC to MLC, then from MLC to TLC) enabled new market adoption due to
the lower cost of packing in more data in similar physical size cells.

Knowing
that TPCM is possible will be encouraging to researchers but with the miniscule
amounts of capacity which are currently viable such future applications will
be limited to architectural niches in rare space constrained chips (such as
state machine registers for fast reboot in embedded processors) rather than
general purpose memory or storage.

Perspective:- 5 years ago in
June 2011 - NVSL demonstrated the world's first
PCIe SSD using PCM as the memory type in the array.AMD enters M.2 SSD market

One of the interesting new things I
noticed on Recadata's web site is that the company talks about its "10
years experience in the SSD market". That refers to its key people who
worked at other SSD companies before the company was founded in
2009.

In
my recent article-
a
simple list of military SSD companies I discussed some of the complex
factors like this which makes it difficult to create a simple list of "experienced"
military SSD companies.E8 Storage gets funding for NVMe rackmounts

Editor:-
May 10, 2016 - E8 Storage today
announced
a $12 million Series B financing round led by Accel, with participation from
existing investors Magma Venture Partners and Vertex Ventures. The investment
will help the company to launch its software-defined NVMe rackmount flash
storage.

Editor:- May
10, 2016 - SanDisk
today
announced
that the Ministry of Commerce of China has approved the acquisition of
SanDisk by Western
Digital. All necessary regulatory approvals for the acquisition have
now been received and the transaction is expected to close on Thursday, May 12,
2016.

Editor:- May 10,
2016 -
Infinidat
today announced that in Q1 2016 shipments of its
InfiniBox
enterprise storage array increased by 300% compared to the year ago period
and now amounts to 422 petabytes worldwide. One of Infinidat's Fortune 500
customers now has over 10PBs of InfiniBox storage spread across multiple
sites. thinking about latency?

"The need for
reviving the SSD bookmarks
series concept after a 5 year gap is because while we're all busily dodging
tornadoes in Kansas to get to a consolidated market there's a lot of dust
making it harder than ever to see what's what."