Self-healing array maker Atrato Inc. is finally making updating its support for solid-state drives and automated tiered storage generally available, a year after it first promised them.

Atrato issued a press release announcing general availability of new SSD units and automated tiered storage software Wednesday, after going back to the drawing board a few times a series of incremental releases following last year’s similar announcement, according to vice president of marketing Bill Mottram.

Atrato originally aimed for released SSD support last May, “but there was more complexity involved in the product than we anticipated,” Mottram said. Atrato’s hybrid VLUN, which spans across solid-state and spinning disks required some tweaks for performance, including a new feature being released this week called “I/O reforming,” which takes blocks of multiple sizes and bundles them into a fixed block size of 256 KB. Mottram said this speeds up moves between SSD and HDD tiers.

Atrato’s arrays are constructed out of enclosures stacked into what it calls a Self-maintaining Array of Identical Disks (SAID). These enclosures, which previously held 10 disks each, are now available with room for 24 drives. Atrato’s SSD enclosure holds 10 or 24 drives, and it now offers multiple configuration options depending on the level of performance or capacity needed.

The updated Velocity 1000 will also support up to four SSD enclosures, whereas last year support was announced for one.

Last year Atrato said it would support Intel’s X-25 E and X-25 M SLC and MLC drives, but now says it will only support the SLC version, as well as 150 GB drives from Pliant on customer request.

A redesign of the V1000 backplane has also boosted Atrato’s performance benchmark claims for the array from 16,000 IOPS to 24,000 IOPS. “It has to do with how we move data within the SAID,” Mottram said, declining to disclose further technical detail.

One feature Atrato customers have asked for, a graphical user interface (GUI) to control the box, remains a roadmap item but should be released toward the end of next month, Mottram said. Until then, the V1000 will continue to be managed through a command-line interface (CLI).

At 600 GB capacity, small form factor (2.5-inch) SAS moves into closer competition with Fibre Channel disk drives in the external storage market. Analysts say the transition to small form factor SAS is largely complete in internal storage, but the conversion of external storage from FC to SAS disks has been a long process.

It was only about 18 months ago, pointed out IDC analyst John Rydning, that the SAS-2 spec was ratified, boosting SAS throughput speeds to 6 Gbps (Fibre Channel is now at 8 Gbps). That fairly recent spec also supported cable lengths between drives of up to 10 meters, more suitable for external disk arrays than the previous limit of six meters.

Meanwhile, until these announcements from Seagate and Toshiba, aerial density on SAS drives, particularly in small form factors, also lagged behind the FC gear the enterprise is accustomed to, Rydning said. “These announcements bring 2.5-inch capacity parity with 3.5-inch Fibre Channel drives that are still primarily used [in external storage systems], creating a migration path for external storage players [to small form factor SAS drives],” he said.

This is a transition Rydning said he expects to continue over the next three years, provided external storage products using small form factor SAS drives work as expected out of the gate. Even then, however, the transition will also depend on the comfort level for storage pros charged with managing systems day to day. “People have built up a knowledge base and comfort level with Fibre Channel — there’s hesitancy to make sure SAS is as robust,” Rydning said.

Dell launched the two 6-gig SAS systems today along with three 6-gig SAS controllers for storage and Dell servers.

The new generation of SAS systems have double the bandwidth of the 3 Gbps SAS that has been on the market since SAS began replacing parallel SCSI in 2005.

Last year, Hewlett-Packard rolled out its StorageWorks D2000 external arrays with 6 Gbps SAS.

Dell senior storage product manager Howard Shoobe wouldn’t say when he expects 6 Gbps SAS support for Dell’s EqualLogic iSCSI SAN or the Clariion storage arrays it co-markets with EMC, but many people in the industry believe 6-gig SAS will threaten Fibre Channel as the dominant high-end disk interface.

“With 6-gig, we see SAS becoming more compelling,” Shoobe said. “This is an important step and the foundation for the next generation of storage products.”

The MD1200 is a 2u box that holds 12 3.5-inch drives or a combination of 3.-5-inch and 2.5-inch drives. It expands to 96 drives with additional enclosures. Dell positions the MD1200 for applications such as disk backup, email, and streaming media.

The MD1220 is also a 2u system but holds 24 2.5-inch SAS drives and expands to 192 drives with eight additional enclosures. Dell sees the MD1220 being used for more I/O-intensive applications such as large databases and Web serving.

Both systems also support SAS interface SSDs from Pliant Technology. The PowerVault MD1220 costs $5,637 and the MD1200 is $5,145.

The MDS1200 and 1220 use the new PERC H800 6-gig SAS controller, which supports redundant pathing and I/O load balancing. With redundant pathing, both cables from the controller connect to the DAS system, so if one cable gets disconnected the system will continue to run. Dell is also bringing out PERC H700 and H200 controllers for 11G PowerEdge servers.

The former employee, Paul Galloway, has reportedly signed an affidavit which is summarized and quoted in the court filing, saying Seagate not only stole Convolve’s noise-reduction technology but has destroyed evidence relevant to the ongoing litigation. The suit, first brought by Convolve and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where the disputed technology was invented, is pending in a federal district court in Texas.

The filing says Galloway came forward in late November after having appeared previously as a witness for Seagate in the lawsuit. Now no longer employed by Seagate, Galloway says he and other engineers in Seagate’s servo group were given information about Convolve’s technology without being told it was supposed to be under NDA. Galloway further alleged Seagate had destroyed or hid a laptop containing his relevant work on the technology, “corrupted” source code blueprints it produced to prove Convolve’s technology hadn’t been stolen, and claimed minutes from a meeting where the Convolve technology was disseminated among Seagate engineers have gone missing.

This most recent testimony was filed in a federal district court in Manhattan, according to the Times. A conference is scheduled for the trial later this month, but it’s unclear whether Galloway’s testimony will be discussed at that meeting.

The first of these is the announcement of a new Storage Performance Council (SPC) benchmark for testing the power consumption of storage devices in the data center. The new SPC-1E spec follows the SPC-1 C/E spec announced in June. Where the SPC-1C/E spec covered storage components and small subsystems (limited to a maximum of 48 storage devices in no larger than a 4U enclosure profile), the SPC-1E spec expands that support to include larger, more complex storage configurations.

According to an SPC presentation on the new benchmark,  ”SPC-1/E is applicable to any SPC-1 storage
configuration that can be measured with a single SPC approved power meter/analyzer.”

For more on how the SPC-1C/E and SPC-1E benchmarks work, see our story on the SPC-1C/E announcement. Users should especially be aware of the parts of the benchmark calculation that can only be specified by vendors.

Still, even an approximate or idealized lab result for power consumption of storage systems would be an improvement over the tools avialable to reliably spec power consumption, increasingly a key cost factor for data centers that users in economically strapped times are looking to cut.

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Speaking of cutting costs, Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) devices are widely regarded as the cheaper choice of the future to replace Fibre Channel systems. With 6 Gbps SAS products now beginning to ship, the SCSI Trade Association laid out its roadmap for the future of connectivity between Serial Attached SCSI drives and other elements of the infrastructure.

3 Gbps SAS devices connected via InfiniBand connectors; the Mini-SAS HD connector will be used with most 6 Gbps devices. The new roadmap laid out this week specifies that the Mini-SAS HD connector will be the hardware of choice going forward for all types of connectivity into SAS devices.

Why do you care? Because the development plans for the Mini-SAS HD connector going forward will allow it to serve optical, active and passive copper cables with one connector device, and automatically detect the type of cable it’s attached to — meaning that by the time 12 Gbps SAS rolls around, less hardware wil need to be ripped and replaced to support it. Another thing the connector will support in the future is managed connections, meaning a tiny bit of memory in the connector itself that allows the devices to be queried for reporting and monitoring.

The ability to connect SAS devices over optical and active copper cables is a pretty big deal — cable length and expandability limitations have improved significantly with SAS-2, but native cable lengths currently remain limited to 10 meters. While this is already making data center SAS subsystems a reality, it will need more robust connectivity attributes to compete directly with Fibre Channel. Optical cables can stretch as far as 100 meters, and active copper (so called because it contains transcievers that boost signals) to 20 meters.

ASTI was a Plasmon reseller before the U.K.-based archiving vendor went under after years of financial problems. ASTI picked up Plasmon’s assets for an undisclosed sum, leased Plasmon’s Colorado Springs manufacturing plant, hired many of its employees and is now stepping up marketing of Plasmon products. ASTI will keep the Plasmon brand name and is selling its UDO appliances, drives, libraries and media after rebuilding its channel with new VARs and integrators.

“It’s an identical product lineup as Plasmon’s,” said Bill Gallagher, a former Plasmon exec who is now ASTI’s director of strategic accounts and regional sales director. “I don’t think Plasmon’s failure was a failure of technology. The company suffered for years with restructuring and trying to get its financials in order. Alliance is profitable, and we haven’t seen any change in demand. Customers are happy, they wanted to see what would happen. ”

ASTI has sold optical storage for more than 10 years, carrying products from Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and Sony as well as Plasmon. ASTI CEO Chris Carr says the company is committed to the future of UDO. “Last year we caught wind of Plasmon’s financial difficulties and we saw an opportunity,” he said. “Specifically, we were looking for UDO technology.”

UDO discs hold up to 60 GB and are supposed to last for more than 50 years. Plasmon’s largest libraries have 638 slots and store 38.3 TB. ASTI execs claim Plasmon shipped over 17,000 libraries. ASTI will not honor service contracts for Plasmon customers but is offering discounts on new contracts, Carr said.

The startup calls the new solid state drive (SSD) technology single mode level cell (SMLC) and expects to be shipping products in its ioDrive and ioDrive Duo PCI Express product lines this quarter.

Fusion-io says SMLC “combines a cost-effective MLC-based solid-state solution with the endurance and performance of SLC,” but it’s really a third option that falls between SLC and MLC in price and performance.

Fusion-io hasn’t released performance numbers, but CTO David Flynn says the SMLC drives close the gap in write speeds and endurance cycles between MLC and SLC. SMLC drives store two bits per cell and come in capacities of 160 GB and 320 GB just like MLC drives – although the SMLC drives require greater overprovisioning to reach those capacities. Generally, SLC drives write about 20% to 30% faster than MLC drives and have about 10 times the write cycles. For the most part, MLC’s shortcomings have kept it out of enterprise SSD products while SLC’s price still scares off a lot of people.

“(SMLC) is very close to SLC,” Flynn said. “I wouldn’t say it’s exactly SLC, but it’s sufficiently close for most uses cases.”

Flynn says SMLC drives will roughly split the difference in cost between its performance SLC ($30 per GB) and capacity MLC ($15 per GB) drives.

Fusion-io already ships enterprise MLC drives that Hewlett-Packard sells as the HP StorageWorks 320GB IO Accelerator.

“This (SMLC) is subtly different,” Flynn says. “Now we can get endurance and performance characteristics of SLC.”

The difference is in the way the controller manages the NAND Flash, he says. “We don’t need special MLC Flash, that would defeat the purpose,” Flynn said. “The purpose is not to have special requirements.”

Dell also sells Fusion-io cards, and IBM has released test results and is committed to selling Fusion-io SSDs down the road.

None of Fusion-io’s partners have publicly signed on to the SMLC cards yet, but Enterprise Strategy Group analyst Mark Peters says SMLC will likely become a third category for NAND Flash alongside SLC and MLC, at least until NAND is replaced by better technology.

“More people will follow, because they have to,” Peters says. “It’s logical. Every piece of research we’ve done says the No. 1 reason people aren’t adopting solid state is price, and this is a move to get the price down.”

Flynn agrees that Fusion-io won’t be the only vendor with SMLC, even if others call it something different.

“We’re first, but we don’t think we’ll be the last,” he said. “It’s too compelling.”

Samsung’s drives generate and store encryption keys and access credentials are in the drive hardware, and they are never held in the operating system or by application software. When ordered in a new computer, the drives will come bundled with Wave’s Embassy Trusted Drive Manager software for life cycle management of the drive. Teh software includes pre-boot authentication, enrolls drive administrators and users, and enables backup of drive credentials. Available separately, Wave’s Embassy Remote Administration Server allows an IT administrator to remotely turn on SSDs and adds event logs for compliance.

It probably won’t be long before full-disk encryption also hits the enterprise SSD space. It’s already working its way in on the spinning-disk side, where it’s being pushed by drive maker Seagate, controller maker LSI and systems vendor IBM. Multiple converging standards for key management are also being developed for the enterprise.

WD today completed a cash acquisition of SiliconSystems, Inc. of Aliso Viejo, Calif., a supplier of solid-state drives for the embedded systems market. The SiliconSystems’ product portfolio includes solid-state drives with SATA, EIDE, PC Card, USB and other interfaces in 2.5-inch, 1.8-inch, and other form factors. WD plans to develop new solid-state offerings to be embedded in OEM systems with the new intellectual property.

Depending on who you talk to, SSDs could become the new tier 1 in storage over the next several years. Not everyone shares such a bullish outlook, but it’s clear to drive makers like WD and Seagate that they must have an offering in this space to compete. Forward Insights president and analyst Gregory Wong sees the acquisition as the only way for WD to develop a competitive offering at this point, noting on his blog today that WD “dabbled” in SSD technology in the early 1990′s.

“However, it appears that early experience wasn’t enough for a latecomer to catch up to the vast improvements in performance and reliability made by SSD vendors recently,” he wrote. “System-level solutions particulary on the firmware side are required to manage the increasing complexities of NAND flash with each new technology generation.”

Wall Street analyst Aaron Rakers of Stifel Nicolaus Equity Research wrote in a note to investors Monday that he expects to see the combined entities focus on positioning embedded SSDs in blade servers.

Dell officials did not return requests for comment today by Storage Soup, but several industry sources have confirmed the report is accurate and say the PS6000S will support 16 solid-state drives. A PS6000E will also be available with only SATA drives, according to one customer who asked not to be named because the product has not yet been formally released.

The general opinion on solid state is that customers will hold out for higher capacities and other features before they buy. Several EqualLogic customers reached by Storage Soup today said they still found SATA drives adequate for their needs.

However, according to Alan J. Hunt, Manager of Operations for Dickinson Wright PLLC, “It’s just the beginning of the market. In a few years I suspect [SSDs are] all we’re going to have–it’s kind of the beginning of the next big wave.”

Hunt added that a fourth port on EqualLogic’s arrays could be more significant than it might appear. “A fourth port means you would have balance if you have two switches and want redundancy,” he said. “Or you could make it a dedicated management port and still have three ports.”

Missing from the coming product update, if reports are accurate, would be 10-Gigabit Ethernet support, which a Dell spokesperson said last year is on the EqualLogic roadmap for 2009. But like with SSDs, EqualLogic customers and resellers say 10-Gig Ethernet can wait.

“I haven’t seen a susstantial interest in 10 Gig,” said Broadleaf Services account executive and EqualLogic VAR Christopher Baer. “There aren’t a lot of applications that require that kind of throughput yet.”

Other customers say 10-GigE would future-proof the array, even if they don’t need the bandwidth quite yet. “Why add another port? Why not 10-GigE and really get this thing going?” said a customer in the education field who requested that his name not be used as he is not authorized to speak with the press. Some pieces of the IT infrastructure in this user’s shop have been upgraded to 10-GigE already, including the network backbone.

“I don’t personally need the bandwidth,” Hunt said. “But it could add the ability to reduce the number of cables and passthrough modules for blades, as well as greatly simplifying VMware deployments.”