Avnet’s SSD Virtual Summit

Avnet's SSD Virtual SummitOn April 3 & 4 Avnet Embedded will host an on-line conference called the SSD Virtual Summit.  This free on-demand seminar will feature a keynote by Yours Truly, The SSD Guy, and presentations by leading SSD makers and related firms including Adaptech, Crucial, Dell, HGST, Intel, Kingston, LSI, Micron, OCZ, Rorke Data, Seagate, SMART Storage, STEC, and Toshiba.

Come join in to learn the latest information on SSDs.

Micron: SSD Over-Inventory at OEMs & Channel

Excess Inventory of SSDsDuring Micron Technology‘s quarterly earnings call an interesting tidbit was revealed: PC OEMs and Micron’s sales channel partners are carrying SSD inventory from panic buys they made in response to Thailand’s floods.

It seems that Micron’s OEMs and channel partners expected the HDD shortage that resulted from the floods to create new market opportunities for SSDs.  This is not an uncommon notion, and it was first discussed by The SSD Guy in a blog post early last November with another post added in January.  It seems that the messages of these posts didn’t reach those OEMs.

Micron mentioned this because Continue reading “Micron: SSD Over-Inventory at OEMs & Channel”

SSDs and Server Consolidation

Consolidating Servers with SSDsA topic The SSD Guy often brings up in presentations is the fact that SSDs can be used in enterprise applications to reduce server count, a phenomenon often called: “Server Consolidation.”  This is a confusing issue, so it bears some explanation.

There are lots of ways to accelerate an I/O-bound application.  The most direct one is to speed up the I/O.  In the past this has involved some pretty elaborate ways of using HDDs in arrays with striping and short stroking.  Many of these arrays cost a half million dollars or more.

Another is to hide the slow I/O speed by Continue reading “SSDs and Server Consolidation”

OCZ: Three Solid State Storage Products in Three Weeks

OCZ's PCIe Z-DriveSSD maker OCZ has been on something of a tear recently, introducing three new solid state storage products in three weeks:

  • Two weeks ago the company introduced the Z-Drive R4 CloudServ PCIe SSD, designed for the data center, in single-card capacities ranging from 300GB-16TB.  This product can transfer data at multiple gigabytes per second rates to deliver over a million IOPS.
  • Last week saw the introduction of the OCZ-SANRAD VXL enterprise storage accelerator, after OCZ’s January acquisition of SANRAD.  This product is flash cache acceleration software for VMware ESX and Citrix Xen virtualized environments that allows Continue reading “OCZ: Three Solid State Storage Products in Three Weeks”