STEC – The SSD Guy Blog

Western Digital to Acquire sTec

The following is excerpted from an Objective Analysis Alert e-mailed to our clients on 24 June, 2013:

Western Digital Corporation (WDC) and sTec, Incorporated announced today an agreement for sTec to be acquired by WDC for $340 million in cash. The HGST subsidiary will assume control of sTec and will continue to support existing sTec products and customers, while also remaining a part of its joint development program with Intel Corp. HGST’s current line of SSDs uses an Intel controller architecture combined with an SAS interface, end-to-end data protection, and other features key to the enterprise SSD marketplace.

Although sTec was a glorious first mover in the SSD business with EMC’s Continue reading “Western Digital to Acquire sTec”

The Week of CEO Changes

This week has gotten off to an odd start. On Monday OCZ CEO Ryan Peterson resigned, after having built the company from a supplier of PC cases, power supplies and DRAM for gamers into a leading SSD maker, and then launching a successful IPO. On Tuesday STEC’s CEO Manouch Moshayedi announced (via an SEC filing) that he will step down “pending resolution of a civil complaint filed against him by the Securities and Exchange Commission.” Finally today Virident announced the hiring of Mike Gustafson of BlueArc repute to become CEO while former CEO and co-founder Kumar Ganapathy shifts his focus to business strategy, new product development and strategic partnerships.

What will Thursday and Friday bring? Continue reading “The Week of CEO Changes”

STEC SSD Survey Yields Surprising Results

STEC ran a survey at VMworld this week to determine who was using SSDs and how they were using them. Some of the results were a little surprising. Out of 136 attendees surveyed:

Only 5% believe that SSDs provide a competitive advantage
56% say that less than 50% of their business-critical applications are supported by SSDs

STEC shared some further results with The SSD Guy:

54% expected Continue reading “STEC SSD Survey Yields Surprising Results”

Intel Jumps Into the PCIe SSD Market

Intel has gotten into the fast-growing and lucrative market for PCIe SSDs. The company has announced a PCIe SSD, the 910, that provides the high performance you would expect of a PCIe drive with the quality guarantees that customers expect of Intel.

Who could blame them? Fusion-io has become a Wall Street darling for creating the PCIe SSD market, and still rides it to continually growing revenues. LSI is fascinated by the growth of its Warp Drive. Micron attained a significant design win at EMC, Texas Memory Systems (TMS) has had success in its own narrow markets, and Virident, OCZ, and STEC have also participated in the PCIe SSD’s market growth.

Intel’s 910 consists of four Hitachi SAS SSD Continue reading “Intel Jumps Into the PCIe SSD Market”

Avnet’s SSD Virtual Summit

On 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.

SSD Presence Growing at Oracle OpenWorld

At Oracle’s October OpenWorld conference in San Francisco more exhibit hall space was dedicated to SSDs this year than ever before. That’s because Oracle runs faster on systems with SSDs than on systems without.

Even Oracle ships SSDs in its popular Exadata system, and the company recently announced that it had shipped over 1,000 installations since its introduction in 2009. Continue reading “SSD Presence Growing at Oracle OpenWorld”