solid state drives

STEC overstock raises red flag about SSD adoption

 SSD supplier STEC’s stock price has taken a dive since the vendor reported last Tuesday that EMC will carry over its 2009 inventory of Flash drives into 2010. Shares have fallen almost $9.00 to $13.18 at today’s close. According to a report from MarketWatch:

Much of the carryover involves STEC’s Zeus IOPS SSD products. EMC makes up about 90% of STEC’s business for the Zeus IOPS drives, and had placed an order for $120 million of the drives for the second half of this year.

STEC officials said that about $55 million of that order has been delivered, and the rest would be shipped before the end of year.

A flurry of class action lawsuits have been filed accusing STEC executives of misleading investors before making their revelation last Tuesday. This all leads me to wonder if the industry has been wrong about SSD adoption overall.

All EMC would say in a statement released through a spokesperson was “EMC is pleased with its SSD demand and growth. In Q4, EMC will introduce unique FAST (fully automated storage tiering) capabilities, which are expected to increase SSD growth and demand even further.”

Does this inventory carryover send a signal about wider SSD adoption in the market, given how dominant STEC’s share is (and EMC dominates its business)? I asked a couple of analysts for their opinions.

“Well, what I have been hearing is that EMC is giving SSD away for free to try to spur adoption, but so far it doesn’t seem to be working — it’s too costly, and too wasteful without some type of FAST capability,”  Forrester Research analyst Andrew Reichman responded in an email. “SSD as a performance add-on is not popular in this economy… It’s interesting to see that STEC can’t make a go of this business even though they have a number of the major storage vendors signed up as partners. That says to me that it’s not competition, but the whole category being slow so far.”

Added Taneja Group analyst Jeff Boles, in another email, “while we’re in the midst of an unusual market that likely over-penalizes STEC for perceived risk, while over-endorsing other companies for perceived value, I remain cautious about the speed of SSD adoption.”

But, he added, the newness of SSD could be creating a vicious cycle of perceived risk.

“What the market needs is a good round of commoditization, brought on by integration of some of this intelligence into the storage system itself,” Boles wrote. “At that point, obsolescence will start to look a bit more unusual, and the roadmap for future devices a little more predictable. After all, if your XYZ array had solid state intelligence in it, and you were buying highly commoditized drives that only changed with the density and performance of the flash memory itself, then there seems to be less risk that your flash investment could be rapidly outdated by the next rev of a drive controller.”

As always, the peanut gallery is invited to weigh in.

HP adds Samsung SSD option for ProLiant servers

Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP) continues to play both the server and array sides of the SSD fence, today announcing Samsung SSDs will be supported in its ProLiant servers.

According to a Samsung press release issued yesterday, its 60 and 120 GB SSDs have been qualified with all HP ProLiant G6  and G5 servers. The two companies claim the drives in ProLiant servers draw 1.9 watts of power when writing to the drive and 1.5 watts when reading; power usage in idle mode is 0.1 watt. The drives are rated for random read commands at 25,000 IOPS and random writes at 6,000 IOPS, with a sequential read speed of 230 MBps and a sequential write speed of 180MBps.

Initially HP officials seemed keener on putting SSDs into the server side of the house, arguing that the closer to the server bus the SSD, the more performance benefit there was, though HP also added array-based SSD options in its most recent EVA refresh. On the server side, HP has also been linked with Fusion-io.

As the SSD market continues to mature, anything that increases competition among product offerings is seen to be a good thing–even STEC’s CTO said recently he’s hoping for more competitors. Stifel Nicolaus analyst Aaron Rakers pointed out in a note to investors today that STEC’s ZeusIOPS drive claims random IOPs of 80,000/40,000 and 350/300MB/s performance; “While we continue to view STEC’s competitive positioning as solid, we believe HP’s announcement with Samsung reflects what looks to be an increased amount of news flow regarding SSD competition in the enterprise server/storage market going forward,” Rakers wrote.

Pillar insists it’s not putting Intel SSDs ‘in the ditch’

A Pillar executive responding to a Computerworld report that the vendor is ”kicking Intel’s SSD to the curb” says Pillar is still considering Intel as an SSD supplier for future releases, while confirming it switched to STEC drives for its Axiom SSD bricks.

Bob Maness, Pillar’s VP of worldwide marketing and channel sales, says Pillar pitted Intel and STEC drives against one another in a qualification process, and “STEC finished first.” In March, Pillar said it would ship Intel SSDs with its Axiom systems but Maness says Intel’s X25-E SSD caused timeout errors with the Axiom controller during multiple concurrent write operations. He said two companies are still working on fixing.

Earlier this year, Intel issued a firmware update to its X25-M consumer SSDs for performance issues due to data fragmentation. Intel executives said at the time that the glitch did not apply to the X25-E.

Pillar also recently swapped out its storage controller processors from Intel to AMD, which Maness said was the result of a similar “first come, first serve” process of qualification. “For most vendors, this is the way they operate with components suppliers,” he said.

Maness said Pillar has used Intel processors in earlier iterations of Axiom and will continue to keep up with its products. “We have had an ongoing relationship with them,” he said. “We’re not putting Intel in the ditch.”

A bigger question for Pillar as it refreshes Axiom with 2 TB drives as well as the SSDs, is whether it will be PIllar’s or Sun’s midmarket storage product lines left in the proverbial ditch by Oracle, whose CEO Larry Ellison is Pillar’s primary investor.

Maness, not surprisingly, says Oracle will pick Pillar. “If you look at the Sun storage product line, you can assume, in my opinion, they probably won’t continue the OEM relationships based on margin,” he said.

He was referring to Sun’s 9000 product line, a rebranding of Hitachi Data Systems (HDS)’s USP high-end disk arrays, as well as the 6000 and 5000 series it rebrands from LSI.

That leaves the Sun 7000 series, or Amber Road, in Pillar’s competitive sights. “Sun servers are already being put in the midst of the Oracle stack,” Maness said, referring to this week’s announcement of Exadata 2. “But they haven’t talked much about storage. Maybe that’s because Pillar is a superior storage product.”

Could simpler QA testing bring down the cost of SSDs?

The Holy Grail for SSDs is to make SLC performance cost as much as MLC, or, even better, as much as hard disk drives. The CTO of SSD manufacturer STEC says it won’t happen, pointing out that every advance in SLC density will have manifold benefits in MLC. Anyone who’s bought the newest iPhone or iPod knows older technology will almost always be cheaper, so SLC or MLC at the price point of HDD seems an even more far-fetched concept.

However, the CEO of Flexstar Technology, a manufacturer of hard drive, SSD and optical media testing equipment for storage vendors and OEMs, says SSDs do have one cost advantage over spinning media: a less complex, potentially more cost-effective quality testing process.

Currently storage OEMs and manufacturers have to put spinning media through extensive QA tests to make sure they stand up against environmental factors from rotational vibration, shock, ambient temperatures and humidity, according to FlexStar President and CEO Tony Lavia. “It’s not enough to test the drives in a clinically clean environment–each vendor needs to know that the drive will work inside their unique cabinet environments.” This means each vendor has to do its own custom testing and qualification process for spinning media.

From Lavia’s perspective, SSDs, with fewer moving parts, will change that picture. “You don’t have to do custom testing,: he said. “Instead OEMs can tell the drive manufacturers to do testing and only send them the drives that pass.” It also opens the door, Lavia said, to third-party testing companies (like, say, FlexStar).

IDC analyst Jeff Janukowicz said Lavia’s reasoning makes sense. “There are close to 100 SSD companies right now, and they don’t all necessarily have the resources to go out and buy their own testing equipment,” he said. “If those companies don’t require extra capital for testing, they could offer cheaper solutions [to end users].”

But least one emerging SSD vendor disagrees with the “no custom testing” idea. “Not all NAND is created equal,” said Pliant Technology’s vice president of marketing Greg Goelz. “We test rigorously using proprietary tools.”

NetApp plans SSDs in arrays by end of 2009

While there was a “flash” of NetApp’s solid state strategy evident in its product launch this week, a big part of it was missing in all the talk of Data Ontap 8 and the vendor’s cloud strategy. The missing part was support for solid state drives (SSD) in NetApp disk arrays. NetApp chief marketing officer Jay Kidd says that’s coming by the end of 2009.

But SSDs in the array are part three of NetApp’s three-part flash strategy. The first part was DRAM-based Performance Acceleration Module (PAM) cards that shipped in February. Now NetApp is rolling out PAM II, which delivers flash memory as cache. The difference in the two PAM cards is the first one has about 10 times faster access times than flash, but costs about 10 times as much. The new flash-based card provide more capacity – the cards come in 256 GB and 512 GB configurations and you can use multiple cards to get up to 4 TB in one system.

“Customers found adding more DRAM cache memory accelerated performance of their workloads, but we had requests for larger capacities,” Kidd said.

Step three will be support for SSDs in arrays, which every other major storage vendor now offers. “We’ll have certification of SSD drives in disk shelves later this year,” Kidd said. “You’ll be able to add them to existing systems, probably with additional disk shelves that support SSD.”

Kidd says NetApp will use SSD drives with native SAS interfaces.

WhipTail claims superior SSD scalability, price

WhipTail Technologies, a spinoff from IT solutions provider TheAdmins, launched a 6 TB SSD appliance this week for a cost of $122,500.

Compared to other offerings currently on the market, the system comes in at a higher capacity (the next-biggest all-Flash system is Texas Memory Systems’ 5 TB RAM-SAN 620) and cheaper (TMS’s system costs $220,000). However, there’s one catch: WhipTail uses multi-level cell (MLC) drives instead of single-level cell (SLC) drives.

Most enterprise solid state drive offerings are based on SLC drives, which have one physical layer on which data is recorded. MLC drives are cheaper, more common in consumer devices, and can hold more data. However, their reliability is generally considered lower than SLC drives because of the complexity of writes to multiple physical layers, cheaper raw materials in some cases, and fewer lifetime write cycles supported.

This is where WhipTail’s software IP comes in, according to CEO Edward Rebholz. The software buffers writes to the system using DRAM and splits the writes to NAND capacity into 2-bit blocks to match the size of each cell on the back-end MLC SSDs, which cuts down on wear to the Flash drives and so prolongs their life cycle.

WhipTail also works with MLC drive suppliers using an “extensive quality control process internally”, Rebholz said. According to the CEO, MLC has also gotten much of its unreliable rep from previous generations of drives made up of 3-bit and 4-bit cells. “Two-bit drives are much better,” Rebholz says. All of this adds up to internal WhipTail estimates that it can make an MLC drive last for about seven years with a full overwrite per day. “On average companies overwrite about 25% every day,” Rebholz pointed out.

With a company so new, that lifespan for MLC drives obviously hasn’t been proven out in the market yet. Storage admins have expressed a desire to see larger SSDs, although that usually means capacity and cost per gigabyte of individual drives rather than pools. They might be intrigued by a lower cost per gigabyte (WhipTail also sells 1.5 TB and 3 TB systems for around $46,000 and $75,600 respectively), although capital expenditures on new technologies are among the most difficult projects to get funded in the current economy.

Another alternative is the single mode level cell (SMLC) drives that Fusion-io launched this week.

For some applications, SSD can be a more efficient alternative both in terms of capex and energy costs to short-stroking conventional hard disk drives. Users going this route may find the price points WhipTail’s offering in a recession more attractive than SLC-based products, but there’s still the matter of trusting the software to provide reliability. I will be curious which direction users will choose to go.

Panasas adds solid state to NAS

Parallel clustered NAS vendor Panasas is the latest vendor to put solid state drives (SSDs) in it storage arrays.

 Panasas will includes SSD in the highest end of the three ActiveStor Series systems it launched today. Series 7 and Series 8 – with no SSD support – are available today, while Series 9 with SSDs are expected in the second half of the year.

Series 9 will have the highest IOPs and lowest latency of Panasas systems, and is aimed at bringing the vendor beyond its high performance computing (HPC) niche into financial services, media and entertainment and life sciences

Panasas Series 9 tiers consist of DRAM cache, SSD, and SATA drives. “We hate Fibre Channel,” Panasas marketing VP Larry Jones says.

Those three non-FC tiers are placed in “turbo” blades on the Panasas Series 9. Each blade has 40 GB of cache, 36 GB of SSDs and 2 TB of SATA. Each shelf holds 11 blades, and Jones says there is no limit on shelves in a system.

Panasas uses Intel X-25E single-level cell (SLC) SSDs. Jones says no pricing is set yet but he expects the SSDs to have a 40% premium over SATA.

ActiveScale 3.4 software includes automatic tiered storage capability to migrate data to the right tier without requiring customers to set policies. “We put data in the right spot automatically,” Jones says.

The Series 9 scales can generate 120,000 IOPS, according to Panasas.

As with Series 9, the Series 8 model supports 10-Gigabit Ethernet and InfiniBand, and up to 440 GB of cache. The entry level Series 7 is GigE only and maxes out at 50 GB cache. The two higher models also include volume snap shots.

Although SSDs are all the rage in storage now, it’s unlikely that SSD support alone will make Panasas more popular outside of the HPC world. Panasas is also counting on the Parallel NFS protocol (pNFS) to make its systems more accessible to the average NAS shop. pNFS, which will likely replace Panasas’s proprietary DirectFlow protocol, isn’t expected in shipping products until 2010.

Fusion-io shovels in $47.5M in fresh funding

How does a startup get $47.5 million in funding in today’s economy?

“By being a leader in a pretty hot sector,” says David Flynn, CTO and one of the founders of Fusion-io, which closed its whopping Series B round today.

That hot sector is flash technology, which is rapidly making its way into enterprise storage. It also helps that Hewlett-Packard is an OEM partner, using Fusion-io’s ioMemory technology in the HP StorageWorks IO Accelerator NAND flash-based storage adapter. Fusion-io also has technology partnerships with IBM and Dell.

Flynn says the Series B funding will help Fusion-io “broadly address the market that’s growing at a break-neck pace, as well as to help us engineer our next-generation product.”

The first of these next-generation products is the ioSAN, due for release over the summer. Fusion-io describes the PCI Express-based ioSAN as server-deployed network-attached solid state storage.

“We’re working on what we call server-deployed network storage – putting components into the server to share high-performance storage over the network,” Flynn said.

Flynn says more than 400 customers are using Fusion-io cards, most of them large organizations running relational databases, web servers, or virtual machines.

Fusion-io also officially announced David Bradford as its CEO, although that move happened at least a month ago. Bradford spent 15 years as Novell, including three years reporting to current Google CEO Eric Schmidt. Bradford also brought Apple founder Steve Wozniak to Fusion-io as chief scientist a few months back.

Now that “Woz” is no longer dancing with the stars, he can devote more time to Fusion-io. Flynn says while Wozniak’s name recognition has helped Fusion-io generate attention, it wasn’t much of a factor in attracting new VC Lightspeed Venture Partners and getting more funding from Series A investors New Enterprise Associates (NEA), Dell Ventures and Sumitomo Ventures.

“It may help get attention, but don’t think it was substantial in closing the deal,” Flynn said. “I think our OEM relationship with HP, our deep relationship with IBM, the fact that Dell is an investor, and our huge market potential is the real essence of why we got funded.”

WD dives in to SSDs

Drive maker Western Digital is looking to hop on to the solid-state drive bandwagon by paying $65 million for a company that has the technology.

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.

Compellent picks STEC solid state drives

Compellent today filled in details about its solid state drive strategy, revealing it will offer 146 GB ZeusIOPS SSDs from STEC for its Storage Center systems.

Compellent will preview the SSD drives at its C-Drive user conference May 3-7, but hasn’t disclosed pricing or availability. Its press release today did say Compellent will package SSDs in a two-drive minimum, which it considers enough for a successful tier 0 approach.

Compellent executives first disclosed plans to include SSD late last year, but talked more about its block-level automated data migration for making solid state more efficient than about the actual hardware until today.

During the company’s earnings conference call last month, CEO Phil Soran predicted Compellent could deliver SSDs at about 10% the cost of competing systems by putting only active blocks of data on solid state while keeping inactive data on spinning disk.

It remains to be seen if Compellent can make good on those claims, but users and analysts say automated data migration will play a major role in helping SSD gain traction in enterprise storage. Compellent appears to have an advantage here, even if it trails EMC, Hitachi Data Systems, Hewlett-Packard and others in shipping SSDs.

All those vendors are also using STEC drives, as are Sun and IBM. EMC, first out with SSDs on enterprise storage, last week added support for 200 GB and 400 GB drives.