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Tag: ssd

  • Waitan Launches World’s First 1.8” microSATA SSD Ejector

    Waitan Launches World’s First 1.8” microSATA SSD Ejector

    waitan

    Waitan, a designer and manufacturer of military and industrial grade solid state drives, has announced its patent pending 1.8″ microSATA SSD ejector product. The ejector is said to be “the first and the only available in the market of the same kind.” It is designed to operator over -40 ~+85C ambient temperature with high resistance against shock and vibrations, which is “ideal for military and industrial computing applications where 1.8″ microSATA SSD or HDD is deployed.”

    The ejector has integrated standard 16 pin microSATA socket that provides robustness and reliability for standard 1.8″ microSATA drives to be inserted and ejected for up to thousands of times.

    Also, its integrated SMT type of SATA connectors provides easy-to-use mechanism that allow system manufacturers to solder the ejector on motherboard hassle-free.

    Over the past ten years, form factors and interfaces of SSDs have been evolved rapidly. Among them, 1.8″ microSATA is the smallest form factor yet still maintain metal housing from which benefits both compact size and EMC shielding. However, since 1.8″ microSATA does not have mounting hole on its metal housing not like 2.5″ SATA does, many system designers have to choose other small form factors such as half slim SATA or mSATA while suffering EMC issues. But Waitan is now able to supply its unique 1.8″ microSATA ejector to the market so that the system designers can now enjoy the full range benefits of deploying 1.8″ microSATA SSD or HDD drives as system or storage disks.

    Some of the major features of the Waitan 1.8″ microSATA ejector includes,

    – Dual propel pedals which provides even and smooth propelling force to eject microSATA drives
    – Ejecting stopper which prevents ejector from damage due to over push of ejecting handler
    – Fish-Spear-Headed fastener which provide easy installation to snap in and fasten the ejector on PCB – Ejecting handler provides easy-to-use mechanism to eject a1.8″ microSATA drives
    – Full length ejecting strip which provides balance of force applied to the microSATA socket and connector area. Hence it prevents both ejector and microSATA device from damage, and it also increases endurance of the ejector and the device.
    – Ejector guiding rail which provides straight line for steel ejector to move back and forth smoothly with even force applied during motion, which further protects ejector and device from damage and to increase endurance for both.

    For more info visit waitanssd.com.

  • Waitan’s StellaHunter: World’s First SSD with Remote Secure Erase and Self-Destruction

    Waitan’s StellaHunter: World’s First SSD with Remote Secure Erase and Self-Destruction

    stellahunter-ssd

    Waitan, a manufacturer of ruggedized solid state drives (SSD) and military grade SSD controller ICs, announced its StellaHunter series rugged SSDs with unprecedented methods of executing military secure erase and self-destroy function via remote control, access and command based on its proprietary technologies.

    The StellaHunter series rugged SSDs are based on Waitan’s proprietary military grade NAND flash management algorithms and ASICs that also feature AES-256 bit hardware based on-the-fly encryption, on-the-board UPS, and ATA command based military secure erase methods.

    It comes with unit capacity up to 4TB in 2.5″ SATA III (6.0 Gbps) form factors.

    Based on users’ application scenarios and availability in different capacities, the remote controlled secure erase and self-destruction function can be executed via satellite communications, cellular communications, Wi-Fi communications, or combinations of two or more of these methods.

    User can opt to pre-set an SSD drive to be reusable after secure erase, or to be permanently destroyed after self-destruction.

    The StellaHunter product family is designed for military, defense and aerospace applications that require high security, high reliability, high ruggedness, and long endurance, such as:

    – Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), unmanned ground vehicles (UGV) and unmanned underwater vehicles (UUV).
    – Military, defense, air force and marine systems
    – Aerospace and aviation computers
    – Rugged Computing, Industrial / Embedded PCs
    – Disaster Recovery, Public Security, Government Systems, Fault Tolerant Applications
    – Remotely operated outdoor and indoor stations for various type of applications

  • OCZ Launches SATA III-based Vector SSD Series

    OCZ, SSD supplier, was recently saddled with a fallible CEO and is now under new direction. OCZ has launched its new consumer SSD through the use of its in-house controller technology, called the Vector.

    OCZ's tumultuous story from a promising start-up to a failing business can be found through this link (insert link). The new power of OCZ, Ceo Ralph Schmitt announced that the product was almost exclusively developed under the previous CEO by using the technology that was purchased with Indilinx in March 2011.

    Schmitt states that the product consists of a 7mm thick 2.5-inch format SSD that is shipped out with a 3.5 inch adapter. It comes in 128Gb and 512 GB capacities. It features a 6Gbit/s SATA interface. The performance numbers are pretty impressive: 100,000 random read IOPS, 550MB/sec and a sequential read bandwidth at 530MB/sec for sequential wiring. These numbers only apply to the compressed or uncompressed data. The device has a five year warranty that guarantees that it will perform 20GB of host writes per day.

    This device uses the Indilinx Barefoot 3 controller with MLC NAND, reported the CEO Ralph Schmitt. He also informed the press that these are some of the first SSD products that are delivered by the new OCZ and they offer leverage with a cutting-edge controller technology that has the ability to deliver groundbreaking levels of both sustained reliability and performance for customers who require a superior SSD for their high-performance computer applications and programs.

    Onyx 3 is a 120GB-240GB MLC SSD using an earlier Barefoot 2 controller from Indilinx and is positioned as a low cost, value product. It is well outclassed by Vector doing a maximum of 23,000 random read IOPS, 235MB/sec sequential reads and 230MB/sec sequential writes.

    OCZ will not be required to pay any license per their component fees to have the ability to use this technology as they would if they were using LSI Sandforce controllers.

    Their existing 2.5 inch consumer SSDs include the Onyx, Vertex, and the Agility product lines. The Vertex 4 uses MLC NAND and has a capacity range from 64GB up to 512GB. It has the same 6Gbit/s SATA interface. The Vertex performs up to 95,000 random read IOPS with incompressible data. It has 560MB/sec sequential reads and 520MB/sec sequential writes. The product uses the Indilinx controller and also has a 5 year warranty. Vector will be replacing Vertex 4 with a smaller amount of performance improvement.

    The Agility 4 is also another MLC, 6Gbit/s SATA and there is a SAS version as well. The Agility 4 performs 48,000 random read IOPS and 85,000 random write s at 400MB/sec on both sequential reads and writes. Vector clearly outperforms it.

    Onyx 3 is a 120GB to 240GB MLC SSD that uses an older Barefoot 2 controller from Indilinx and is a low cost valued product. It is very well outclassed by Vector, only performing a maximum of 23,000 random read IOPS at 235MB/sec on sequential reads and 230MB/sec on sequential writes.

    OCZ will probably introduce Barefoot 3 controllers into other products in its range, using SAS and they are looking forward to improving their gross margin on products using Barefoot 3. If it performs as they expect and is reliable enough, then OCZ can look to gain a better product reputation, one of their weakest areas of business.

  • Mercury Technology Delivers “Green” Cloud for Oracle EBusiness Suite Using RamSan Flash Storage

    Texas Memory Systems and Mercury Technology today announced that the Mercury Technology ultra high performance “Enterprise Cloud” hosted solutions for Oracle-based applications are powered by Texas Memory Systems’ RamSan PCIe-based solid state disks (SSD).

    Users of the RamSan SSD-enabled servers see significantly higher performance so their Oracle applications can handle very high transaction volumes and more simultaneous users than is possible with hard disk-based systems.

    “We added solid state disks to win additional new business with a premium enterprise cloud-based hosting service for large users of Oracle-based applications,” said Brian Day, Vice President of Sales at Mercury Technology. “We also wanted to maintain our cost advantage by building a more energy-efficient, lower-maintenance and greener, data center. The Texas Memory Systems RamSans allowed us to do that.”

    The RamSan PCIe Fault Tolerant Flash-based SSD cards are easily inserted into a server’s PCIe slot to deliver up to 120,000 sustained I/Os per second (IOPS) with a mere 50 microsecond latency and just 15 watts of power. This industry-leading latency is key to RamSan’s ability to accelerate transactions and improve user response time, resulting in productivity gains for users. .

    “We chose Texas Memory Systems because it is the only company that has such a long history in this technology,” continued Mr. Day.

    ”The other vendors are newer players, none of whom have been working in the Oracle world. It’s important to have a partner that is not only knowledgeable, but who also has first-hand experience with other customers running Oracle software, a company that develops its own products based on the feedback it gets from customers. We wanted to offer our clients the stability that only Texas Memory Systems offers today.”

    “Some of the biggest, most demanding Oracle customers are hosted with Mercury Technology so we were delighted that it chose our RamSan solid state disks over all competing alternatives,” said Jamon Bowen, Director of Sales Engineering at Texas Memory Systems. “RamSan solutions are a proven way to turbo charge Oracle performance.”

    Related articles
    Texas Memory Systems Delivers Record 5-Million IOPS Flash-based SSD System
    Texas Memory Systems Sets New SPC-1 Records for Flash Storage Performance
    Texas Memory Systems’ New RamSan-630 Achieves 1 Million IOPS in 6U Flash Storage

  • Seagate Introduces Its First Enterprise SSD: Pulsar

    Seagate introduced the Seagate Pulsar drive, the first product in its new enterprise SSD family.

    Designed for enterprise blade and general server applications, the Pulsar uses SLC (single-level cell) technology, delivers up to 200GB capacity, and is built in a 2.5-inch form factor with a SATA interface. It leverages non-volatile flash memory rather than spinning magnetic media to store data.

    According to Seagate, its new SSD achieves a peak performance of up to 30,000 read IOPS and 25,000 write IOPS, 240MB/s sequential read and 200 MB/s sequential write.

    “Its SLC-based design optimizes reliability and endurance and helps provide a .44% AFR rating with a 5-year limited warranty. As an additional safeguard, the Pulsar drive leverages Seagate’s enterprise storage expertise to protect against data loss in the event of power failure,” the company says.

    The drives are available in 50GB, 100GB and 200GB capacities.

    “Our strategy is to provide our customers with the exact storage device they need for any application, regardless of the component technology used. We are delivering on that strategy with the Pulsar drive, and you can expect additional products in the future from Seagate using a variety of solid state and rotating media components,” said Dave Mosley, Seagate executive vice president.

    Joseph Unsworth, research director at Gartner said, “The enterprise SSD market is now primed and well-positioned for growth from both a revenue and unit perspective, with Gartner estimating unit growth to double and sales to reach $1 billion for calendar year 2010.”

    “Superior enterprise SSDs provide transformational capabilities when optimized in storage and server environments,” he added.

  • Micron First To Deliver Native SATA 6Gb/s SSD

    Micron claims it has raised the performance bar for SSDs with the launch of its RealSSD C300 SSD, the industry’s fastest for notebook and desktop PCs.

    While benchmark tests have shown that the C300 SSD is the fastest PC SSD leveraging the industry standard SATA 3Gb/s interface, the SSD performance is further boosted by natively supporting the next generation high-speed interface – SATA 6Gb/s, according to Micron.

    “While some drive architectures require a trade-off between throughput-sensitive and IOPS-sensitive data streams, Micron’s core design and higher speed interface provides advantages for both,” the company says.

    The C300 SSD leverages the SATA 6Gb/s interface to achieve a read throughput speed of up to 355MB/s and a write throughput speed of up to 215MB/s. Using the common PC Mark Vantage scoring system, the C300 SSD turns in a score of 45,000 from the HDD Suite.

    “Hard drives gain little performance advantage when using SATA 6Gb/s because of mechanical limitations,” said Dean Klein, vice president of memory system development at Micron.

    “As a developer of leading-edge NAND technology, along with our sophisticated controller and firmware innovations, Micron is well positioned to tune our drives to take full advantage of the faster speeds achieved using the SATA 6Gb/s interface. The combination of these technology advancements has enabled the RealSSD C300 drive to far outshine the competition,” he added.

    The RealSSD C300 drive was designed using micron’s established 34nm MLC NAND flash memory. Bringing another first to SSDs, Micron’s 34nm MLC NAND supports the high-speed ONFI 2.1 standard and it’s expected to ensure the NAND performance keeps pace with the faster SATA 6Gb/s interface.

    The drives will be available in 1.8-inch and 2.5-inch form factors, with both drives supporting 128GB and 256GB capacities. The company informed they are currently sampling the C300 SSD in limited quantities and expects to enter production in the first quarter of 2010.

  • Texas Memory Systems Sets New SPC-1 Records for Flash Storage Performance

    Texas Memory Systems announced that its RamSan-620 Flash Solid State Disk (SSD) has submitted a record setting SPC-1 Result.

    Launched in August, the RamSan-620 produced 254,994.21 SPC-1 IOPS with Average Response Time of 0.72 milliseconds all from a 2U rack-mount chassis.

    The RamSan-620 delivers its performance at a cost of only $1.13 per SPC-1 IOPS. That SPC-1 Price-Performance is better than any competing RAID solution or Flash solution, as the company claims.

    According to the firm, Texas Memory Systems now holds the top 3 positions for storage price-performance as well as Average Response Time.

    "Texas Memory Systems is to be congratulated for producing an SPC-1 Result that demonstrates excellent performance with outstanding response time," said Walter E. Baker, administrator of the Storage Performance Council.

    The Storage Performance Council     (SPC) is a vendor-neutral organization that establishes storage benchmarks and disseminates objective, verifiable storage performance data.

    SPC-1 is a sophisticated performance benchmark for storage subsystems. The benchmark simulates the demands placed upon storage in a typical server-class computer system. SPC-1 provides measurements in support of real-world environments and is designed as a source of comparative storage subsystem performance information.

    The RamSan-6200 is a scaled up system that combines twenty RamSan-620 solid state disks in a single datacenter rack and uses Texas Memory Systems’ TeraWatch software to provide unified management and monitoring from a single GUI console.

    The system utilizes enterprise grade Single Level Cell (SLC) Flash as well as multiple levels of RAID and advanced Flash management algorithms.

    A single RamSan-620 unit provides 5TB of SLC Flash with 250,000 sustained IOPS for random reads and random writes. Each RamSan-620 unit can support 2 to 8 Fibre Channel or up to 4 InfiniBand links.

    The company says the falling cost of high speed SSD now makes it cost-effective to replace racks of hard disk drives. For example, a single 5 terabyte RamSan-620 can outperform a 500 drive RAID at a fraction of the cost, power requirement, and data center space,” the company says.

    “The RamSan-620 established new Flash records using off-the shelf servers and systems that can be reasonably purchased, rather than multi-million dollar, limited environment supercomputing class systems that do not reflect typical data center capabilities,” according to Texas Memory Systems. .

  • Panasas Announces the World's Highest-Performance File Storage System

    Panasas intoroduced the ActiveStor Series 9 parallel storage system, which is believed to be the highest-performance file storage system in the world, as the company claims.

    "This is an exciting performance breakthrough for our industry," said Randy Strahan, CEO of Panasas.

    The new company’s system achieves its unprecedented performance by using multiple storage technologies via a synchronized architecture combining three tiers of storage — cache, SSD, and SATA — on each blade.

    It utilizes the Intel® X25-E Extreme SATA SSD for meta-data operations and smaller user files. Larger files are handled by cost-effective, large-capacity SATA disk drives.

    Unlike single-dimensional storage solutions, which offer either high-bandwidth performance or optimized IOPS, the ActiveStor uses multiple storage technologies in a synchronized architecture to produce both.

    A single 42U rack configured with the new Series 9 system is capable of delivering an estimated 80,000 NFS operations per second, as well as 6 gigabytes per second of throughput. Additional performace can be gained in a linear fashion simply by adding additional Panasas shelves or racks to a configuration.

    This unique "no compromise" combination of performance and expandability allows Panasas to deliver industry-leading throughput, as well as IOPs performance as much as 80 percent higher than most competitive storage systems. In addition, the new Panasas system can achieve these results with fewer disk drives than others, the company claims.

    According to Strahan, this new system expands Panasas’ ability to help customers save money across their storage infrastructure by increasing their ability to consolidate a wider variety of applications and workloads in a single storage architecture, including high-performance clustered applications, single-client applications, and technical and commercial applications running NFS and CIFS file protocols.

    "Panasas has now upped the ante in terms of performance relative to footprint and is allowing customers to reduce management costs and increase productivity by consolidating on a single platform," said Terri McClure, senior analyst at analyst firm Enterprise Strategy Group.

    "Inadequate performance of storage is a major inhibitor of the compute environment to perform with enough speed to support the data intensive problems companies are required to solve today."

  • IBM Delivers First Integrated Solid State Drive Support

    IBM announced that its storage virtualization offering, the IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller (SVC), “is now faster, more scalable, and delivers the industry’s first integrated Solid State Drive support.”

    SVC is a storage virtualization system that complements server virtualization technologies and enables a single point of control for storage resources (both IBM and non-IBM arrays) to support “improved business application availability, better IT infrastructure flexibility, and greater resource utilization.”

    Building on IBM’s Quicksilver technology, IBM is introducing SVC 5.0, which now supports Solid State Drives (SSDs).

    The tight integration of SSDs with SVC enables to take advantage of the high throughput capabilities of solid state by delivering up to 800,000 operations per second, and with response times of approximately one millisecond, nearly one-tenth of traditional disk storage.

    SVC support of SSDs is highly flexible with a minimum configuration of only one SSD, helping make the technology more affordable yet scalable without disruption to enterprise requirements, as the company claims.

    According to IBM, additional enhancements to SVC include 8Gbps Fibre Channel support, enabling higher throughout across Storage Area Networks, a tripling of the maximum cache to 24GB per engine, and support for consolidated DR configurations, enhancing SVCs business continuity capabilities.

    SVC also supports attachment to servers using iSCSI protocols over IP networks, which can help reduce costs and simplify server configuration.

    SAN Volume Controller 5.0 will be available November 6, with a US starting list price of $40,000.

  • New Book From Oracle Guru: "Oracle Performance Tuning With Solid State Disk"

    Dramatic decreases in the cost of Solid State Disk (SSD) over the past five years are changing Oracle architectures. Deploying SSD in place of hard disk drives can result in immediate performance gains as both Random Access Memory (RAM) and Flash SSD eliminate bottlenecks caused by mechanical hard disk I/O latency.

    The increasing popularity of SSD is challenging DBAs to adapt their database performance tuning methodologies in order to optimize application performance and return on investment.

    The book from Mike Ault shows how to accelerate Oracle databases and target solid state disk for maximum benefit, as Rampant Press, the publisher, says.

    “Solid State Disk is changing the game for Oracle databases, and how we think about performance tuning,” said Ault.

    “Whereas in the past a poorly-designed database might take six months and $500,000 in consulting costs to repair, simply installing SSD can mean the database immediately runs more than ten times faster for a fraction of the cost of repairing the source code. We wrote the book specifically for DBAs so that they could easily understand the benefits and limitations of SSD in their specific circumstances, and have all the tools they need to benchmark effectively. Any DBA who wants to keep their performance tuning skills relevant will read this book.”

    According to the publisher, Oracle Performance Tuning With Solid State Disk provides a comprehensive guide that enables DBAs to make the transition to SSD successfully and with confidence. By accelerating Oracle databases, applications can handle more transactions, more concurrent users and deliver higher profits and productivity gains.

    “It is a clear and definitive guide for converting existing systems from hard disk to SSD technology and empowers DBAs to make the logical choice of how and when to use SSD. The book provides an in-depth examination of testing methodologies, with clear examples, that DBAs can use to effectively benchmark and improve their own specific databases,” says Rampant Press.

    Mike Ault is an Oracle expert and a prolific author, who has published more than twenty Oracle-related books. He was an Oracle database specialist at Quest Software and has has five Oracle Masters Certificates more than 17 years of experience as an Oracle DBA and consultant.

    He is Oracle guru in residence at Texas Memory Systems, where he oversees Texas Memory Systems’ sponsorship of StatspackAnalyzer.com, a free tool that is popular in the Oracle community.

    As a special introductory promotion, Texas Memory Systems will be giving away a limited number of free copies to visitors to its booth at Oracle Open World 2009 from October 12th through 15th.