Nimbus Data has released a 100% solid-state drive (SSD) system with a 10-year endurance guarantee. This is double what is generally expected of a storage system with spinning hard disk drives. That is because electro-mechanical devices used in spinning drives have much more difficult time reaching longer lifespans when they are in constant use.

The not-so-subtle implications of the 10-year lifespan will become a competitive issue and other vendors will make similar announcements for their systems, proving again that competition is a good thing.

From a customer perspective, a storage system that that can last 10 years and continue to provide value in storing information can have major impacts in IT. The primary consideration, as always, is the economic impact.

• Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) is dramatically changed with the longer lifespan. Many of the costs included in TCO are divided by the service lifespan of the storage system. Changing to a 10-year lifespan greatly reduces acquisition and training costs.

• The operational expense of migrating from one system to another, primarily represented in the time required for administrators to manage the migration, is reduced over 10 years.

• Risks that occur when a new system is introduced into IT are also reduced as fewer introductions are done with the longer lifespan.

• Solid state offers power reduction savings from transitions from one generation of disk drive technology to the next. This simplifies cost savings in ROI.

Because of these factors, a system‘s expected lifespan will become a major factor when evaluating all-SSD arrays.

(Randy Kerns is Senior Strategist at Evaluator Group, an IT analyst firm).

Violin will bundle management software IP such as snapshots, cloning, deduplication, synchronous replication and thin provisioning from Symantec Storage Foundation into its Flash Memory Arrays. Customers can choose to license the software if they need it.

Narayan Venkat, vice president of products for Violin, said early all-flash array customers mainly run high-performing databases. Those database applications have built-in management features. But with flash adoption rapidly spreading to virtual machines, virtual desktop infrastructures, test/development and storage for private clouds, more storage management is needed.

“In virtualization environments, customers are saying ‘we would love to have capabilities like those that exist in legacy storage systems,’” Venkat said.

Other flash startups such as Nimbus Data, Pure Storage and Greenbytes have developed their own management software. But even with $186 million in funding, Violin management chose to OEM those features rather than start from the ground up to build software that EMC and NetApp have offered for years. So Violin turned to hardware-independent Symantec. Venkat said Violin engineers have worked with Symantec for close to a year to tailor IP from Storage Foundation to Flash Memory Arrays. He said the software was optimized to work with the speed of flash rather than spinning disk.

“Flash introduces a whole set of nuances — things like metadata management, handling garbage collection, hiding erase cycles while snapshots are taken,” Venkat said. “We worked on those to make data management run at the speed of memory.”

He said Violin plans to add Symantec’s asynchronous replication technology early next year.

Calligo CEO Julian Box said Calligo went live with SolidFire about a month ago. Calligo uses SolidFire storage as the back end for its CloudSafe (Disaster Recovery), CloudDesk (virtual desktop), CloudNet (virtual network), and CloudCore (Infrastructure as a Service) services.

Box cited SolidFire’s performance, automated reporting and monitoring, and the ability to scale capacity and performance independently as reasons why he chose the newcomer’s array.

Calligo has one SF3010 array with 10 300GB SSDs for 3 TB of raw capacity, and Box said SolidFire’s compression and deduplication gives him about 50 TB of effective capacity.

Before choosing SolidFire, Box said he looked at traditional storage arrays from Hewlett-Packard 3PAR and Dell Compellent. He said 3PAR would require hundreds if not thousands of disks to get the throughput he gets from SolidFire.

“We have oodles and oodles of power and throughput,” he said. “I have five nodes for 250,000 IOPS and it takes up 5u.”

He said he expects to add about one storage node a month to keep up with capacity demand. As for performance, he said “We have more IOPS now than we could ever consume.”

Box also likes that he can use SolidFire’s quality of service to guarantee performance on a volume basis.

“It’s broken the link for capacity and performance,” he said of the SolidFire array. “We can control capacity and performance like a dial.”

He said the one thing missing from SolidFire is replication, a feature that could facilitate disaster recovery.

X-IO’s Hyper ISE storage system won Best Hardware and Storage Product and Attendees’ Pick at TechEd. Hyper ISE uses solid-state drives and hard drives in self-contained enclosures.

Sicola said EMC executives unintentionally endorsed Hyper ISE last month at EMC World by claiming the hybrid approach is best for flash.

“Even [EMC CEO Joe] Tucci said hybrid is the best SSD solution for the foreseeable future,” Sicola said. “We’re the guys who started hybrids.”

EMC is also preparing to launch an all-flash storage product next year from technology acquired from startup XtremIO. Sicola said X-IO has all-flash storage in its plans too, but sees plenty of value left in hard drives.

“We will do all-SSDs when it’s time,” he said. “It will be great when the price comes down. As SSDs get more mature – and the price curve is helping – you’ll see more SSDs hitting the market, but hard drives still do pretty well.”

Despite a seven percent revenue growth to $3.7 billion for information storage products last quarter, EMC CFO Dave Goulden said during the vendor’s earnings call that it struggled to meet demand for high-capacity hard drives. Goulden said the drive shortage caused by Thailand floods last year is improving, but EMC will keep its 5 percent to 15 percent price increases at least into late 2012.

“There were and still are constraints in nearline drives,” he said. “We got the drives we needed to make our numbers, but nearline drives came in late and we had to do some balancing to meet supply and demand. There will be constraints in certain classes of drives the entire year.”

Goulden said he doesn’t think the drive shortage cost EMC any customers because “everbyody’s in the same boat when it comes to drive availability.”

His comments were in line with Seagate’s claims during its earnings call earlier in the week that the shortage has eased for some drive types, but high-capacity nearline drives are still restricted.

Despite its revenue growth last quarter, EMC’s high-end storage declined 10 percent from last year. EMC execs said that was largely due to an unusually strong first quarter in 2011, but EMC CEO Joe Tucci agreed with an analyst who asked if it might also be caused by customers waiting for a VMAX product refresh.

Pointing out the current VMAX platform launched three years ago, Tucci said, “our customers are expecting a new high-end product. We don’t want to ruin our announcement, but customers expecting that will not be disappointed. It’s coming soon.”

Tucci also said more details on Project Thunder will be disclosed at EMC World next month, and it will go into beta over the next few months. EMC COO Pat Gelsinger added that he considers the Project Thunder shared storage appliance more lucrative then the VFCache “Project Lightning” host-based PCIe flash card launched earlier this year, because Project Thunder is more in line with EMC’s storage background.

“A Thunder-like appliance is an easier product for the EMC sales force,” he said. “There is a lot of interest for the Thunder appliance in many use cases. We’ve accelerated our internal activities for VFCache, Thunder, the use of MLC [multi-level cache], and hybrid arrays. A large majority of the industry will be hybrid arrays for the long term.”

Tucci added that EMC is committed to all types of flash – including solid-state drives (SSDs) in storage arrays, 100 percent flash arrays, and hybrid arrays – as well as Fibre Channel and SATA hard drives. “For sure, information storage is not a one-size-fits-all world,” he said.

Tucci also addressed another favorite EMC topic, the cloud. He said private clouds will be the most popular type of cloud for a long time, but “we believe the world [eventually] is going to be hybrid. Customers are working on virtualizing and private cloudizing tier one applications in significant numbers. That’s where the action is. But when customers get to peak times they’ll push some apps out to the public cloud so they don’t have to buy capacity for peak times.”

Other tidbits from the EMC call:

• Isilon revenue nearly doubled from last year, with the help of a 28 PB purchase from a web company.
• VNX unified storage systems has brought EMC nearly 6,000 new customers since it launched in early 2011.
• Revenue from midrange products (VNX, Data Domain, Avamar, Isilon) grew 26% year over year.

Violin has pulled in $150 million in funding since former Fusion-io CEO Don Basile became Violin’s CEO in late 2009. Basile said Violin has grown from 100 employees to 320 since last June, and sales increased 500% over the last year. He puts Violin’s valuation at $800 million, which is probably more than 10 times its annual revenue.

Violin likes to bring in funding money from strategic investors as well as venture capitalists. Violin’s NAND supplier Toshiba has been an investor since the first funding round, and joined SAP as the largest investors in this latest round. Previous investor Juniper Networks and newcomer Highland Capital Partners were other investors in today’s round.

“We’re getting in the habit of this,” Basile said after closing his fourth funding round at Violin. “At the end of last year we considered the public market, but our bankers weren’t sure if the public market was open in the first quarter of 2012, so we took a mezzanine round. This gives us money to grow and operate regardless of market decisions.”

Violin sells all-flash storage arrays and caching appliances. Basile points to EMC’s VFCache PCIe caching product and its plans for a Project Thunder flash-based shared storage appliance that will compete with Violin as proof that the enterpreise flash market is poised to take off.

By Basile’s count, there are at least 30 companies selling all-flash arrays now, although he said Violin mostly competes with traditional storage vendors offering solid-state drives mixed in their hard drive arrays. Solid-state storage companies raised more than $300 million in funding in 2011, and have also been prime acquisition targets. “

Violin acquired the assets of Gear6 in 2010, and turned the technology into its vCache NFS Caching product. Basile said some of Violin’s latest funding may be used for small acquisitions to enhance its product line. “We’re an active reviewer of companies,” he said. “Expect us to acquire things that make sense to buy rather than engineer from the ground up.”

Unlike the server and services announcements HP made at its Global Partner Conference, HP made its storage news with little fanfare on a company blog.

The HP P4900 SSD Storage System has 16 400 GB multi-level cell (MLC) SAS SSDs – eight in each of the system’s two nodes. Each two-node system includes 6.4 TB, and customers can add 3.2 TB expansion nodes to scale to clusters of 102.4 TB. Expansion nodes increase the system’s IOPS as well as capacity.

The systems use the HP SMARTSSD Wear Gauge, which is firmware that monitors SSD drives and sends out alerts when a drive gets close to the end of its life. The monitoring firmware is part of the P4000 Management Console.

HP claims the monitoring and scale-out architecture solve the major problems with solid-state storage arrays. “When it comes to SSDs in general, they are great for increasing IOPS and benefitting a business with lower power/cooling requirements,” P4000 product marketing manager Kate Davis wrote in the blog. “But the bad comes with unknown wear lifespan of the drive. And then it turns downright ugly when traditional dual-controller systems bottleneck the performance that was supposed to be the good part. … Other vendors must build towers of storage behind one or two controllers – LeftHand scales on and on.”

The large storage vendors offer SSDs in place of hard drives in their arrays, and there’s no reason they can’t ship a system with all flash. But the P4900 is the first dedicated all-flash system from a major vendor. Smaller vendors such as Nimbus Data, Pure Storage, SolidFire, Violin Memory, Whiptail and Texas Memory Systems have all-SSD storage systems.

A 6.4-TB P4900 costs $199,000. The expansion unit costs $105,000.

Enterprise PCIe flash pioneer Fusion-io began the trend by acquiring IO Turbine last August, and OCZ picked up Sanrad for its PCIe caching software in January. Solid-state vendor STEC internally developed its EnhanceIO caching software, and EMC’s caching software and FAST auto-tiering appliance play a big role in its VFCache server-side flash product.

The acquisition of FlashSoft leaves startups Nevex, Velobit and perhaps a few other vendors still in stealth as obvious targets for solid-state vendors. Nevex and Texas Memory Systems last week said they were jointly developing software that would speed applications running on TMS SSD storage.

FlashSoft software turns SSD and PCIe sever flash into a cache for the most frequently accessed data. The company came out of stealth last June with FlashSoft SE for Windows and later added FlashSoft SE versions for Linux, VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V.

SanDisk said it will sell FlashSoft SE as standalone software and with the Lightning Enterprise SSDs and upcoming PCIe-based devices based on technology that it acquired by buying Pliant last May for $327 million. SanDisk’s SSDs are used by Dell EqualLogic, NetApp, Hewlett-Packard and others through OEM deals.

“We think this is the next step in our performance acceleration journey,” said Greg Goelz, VP of SanDisk’s enterprise storage solutions group.

Goelz said FlashSoft software was appealing because it can work with any hardware and that fits with SanDisk’s OEM model, and it scales better than competitors. “We looked at how did they scale in capacity? If you move from 100 gigabytes of SSDs to terabytes, does the metadata scale exponentially? Is the overhead low? Does it have the best approach to support what’s out there today and to support the evolution from single server to virtualization and clusters? FlashSoft was well ahead of anybody in the market by a substantial lead.”

SanDisk did not disclose the purchase price for FlashSoft.

Although WhipTail failed to disclose the amount of its funding, but industry sources say it was about $9.5 million. That’s not in the same ballpark of the $35 million and $40 million funding rounds its rival Violin Memory secured last year, but WhipTail CEO Dan Crain said his company is close to profitable with close to 100 employees and is picking up about 20 customers per quarter.

“We are well-capitalized,” Crain said.

WhipTail bills its XLR8r as a cost-effective enterprise all-flash array, using multi-level cell (MLC) memory drives. The vendor goes after customers with a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), but Crain said it serves many types of industries.

AMD’s System Optimization Engineering Department said it replaced 480 15,000 RPM Fibre Channel drives with WhipTail’s solid-storage arrays for a 50-times improvement in latency and 40% performance increase.

AMD did not say how much flash capacity it bought from WhipTail, but Crain said is average deal is in the 25 TB to 30 TB range.

WhipTail isn’t the only all-flash array vendor out there. Nimbus Data, SolidFire, Texas Memory Systems, and Violin have all-SSD systems, Pure Storage is in beta and the large storage vendors will likely follow. Unlike a lot of the all-flash vendors, though, Crain said “We don’t compete on price. We solve a myriad of problems around performance.

“The field is still narrow for credible SSD manufacturers. The storage industry inherited NAND, and there is a lot of science and engineering that has to go into making NAND work in the enterprise,” he said. “We understand this stuff. We treat NAND and flash memory like flash, we don’t treat it like a hard disk.”

OCZ Technology kicked off the year’s M&A Monday by dropping $15 million on privately held Sanrad. The acquisition is part of OCZ’s push into enterprise flash, specifically PCIe cards.

Sanrad has been around since 2000. It started off selling iSCSI SAN switches, and then adapted those switches for storage and server virtualization. But OCZ is most interested in the software that runs on those switches. Sanrad last September launched VXL software that caches data on flash solid-state storage.

VXL runs as a virtual appliance and distributes data and flash resources to virtual machines. The software enables caching more efficiently and lets customers distribute flash across more VMs without a performance hit. VXL software does not require an agent on each VM and supports VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V and Citrix Xen hypervisors.

Sanrad’s StoragePro software lets administrators manage storage across servers or storage devices as a single pool. Sanrad sold StoragePro with its V Series virtualization switches.

During OCZ’s earnings call Monday evening, CEO Ryan Peterson said the Sanrad software will be packaged with OCZ’s Z-Drive PCIe SSDs. The move can be considered competitive to Fusion-io’s acquisition of caching software startup IO Turbine last year.

Peterson said the Sanrad acquisition is part of OCZ’s strategy to see PCIe “as more than simply a component and truly as a storage system, which includes things like having VMware, virtualization capability, and support for vMotion, where there is mobility among the virtual machines of the cache …”

Ryan didn’t mention any plans for Sanrad’s switches. He said Sanrad’s revenue was in the “low single-digit millions” over the past few years, indicating low sales despite OEM deals with Brocade and Nexsan.

OCZ also revealed a new PCIe controller platform developed with chip maker Marvell. The new Kilimanjaro platform will be used in the next version of the Z-Drive, R5. That card will have a PCIe 3 interface. It can deliver about 2.4 million 4K file size IOPS per card and approximately 7 GBps of bandwidth, according to OCZ and Marvell. OCZ is demonstrating the R5 at CES and Storage Visions with an IBM server this week in Las Vegas.

It is also demonstrating new 6 Gbps SATA-based SSD controllers based on its 2011 acquisition of Indilinx.

OCZ’s push to the enterprise is beginning to pay off. Peterson said OCZ’s enterprise-class SSD revenue increased approximately 50% year over year last quarter and now makes up approximately 21% of its SSD sales.