Kaminario Goes All-Flash

Kaminario K2Kaminario has introduced the 4th generation of its K2 enterprise-grade storage array.  Unlike the company’s earlier K2s, which supported DRAM, SSD, and HDD, the fourth generation K2 is all-flash, based on SAS SSDs alone.  The company says that its new approach reduces the cost of ownership by supporting a larger capacity within a smaller footprint while requiring less power and cooling.

The SSDs are MLC products, rather than the SLC ones used in earlier K2s, allowing Kaminario to reduce the cost.  Although the SSDs Kaminario uses come with a 5-year warranty, the K2’s SPEAR operating system  optimizes flash endurance allowing Kaminario to offer a 7-year warranty. (SPEAR is Kaminario’s scale-out performance storage architecture operating system software.)

The original K2 was built with a focus on Continue reading “Kaminario Goes All-Flash”

IBM to Invest $1B in Flash Promotion

The following is excerpted from an Objective Analysis Brief e-mailed to our clients on 15 April, 2013:

Comparison of 3-Year Operating Costs: Flash vs HDD (Wikibon)On April 11 IBM kicked off “The IBM Flash Ahead Initiative”, committing to spend more than $1 billion for flash systems and software R&D and to open twelve IBM Flash Centers of Competency around the world staffed with flash experts armed with flash systems to help clients test drive flash in their own situations.

This follows from IBM’s August 2012 agreement to acquire privately-held Texas Memory Systems (TMS), a very low profile manufacturer of high-performance flash-based memory arrays and PCIe SSDs. TMS is the world’s oldest SSD maker, founded in 1976, to manufacture RAM-based replicas of HDDs. About four years ago TMS used its Continue reading “IBM to Invest $1B in Flash Promotion”

WDC’s HGST Intros 12G SAS MLC SSDs

Latencey Histogram of HGST's MLC SSDIn case you didn’t have enough abbreviations in your life, The SSD Guy brings you the headline above, with the promise that the news below is really interesting: HGST (formerly Hitachi Global Storage Technology, but now a division of WDC – Western Digital Corp.) has brought out a new line of 12Gb/s SAS SSDs based on MLC flash.  These are a part of the UltraStar line.

Whereas HGST’s first-generation UltraStar SAS SSDs used SLC flash, the new SSDs are based on 25nm MLC flash but offer the same warranties as HGST’s prior generation.  Even so, performance for the new SSDs is significantly faster than that of their SLC-based predecessors, with no reduction in wear or lifetime specifications.

These SSDs are the first to support Continue reading “WDC’s HGST Intros 12G SAS MLC SSDs”