News from the SSD front

While I firmly believe we at BnS spend too much time on insidebaseball I must admit it's entertaining to talk about stock prices and off thewall technologies that may never actually make it to a data center nearyou.  Since I just couldn't face writingthe umpteenth installment in the never ending archive saga this afternoon we'llgo back to the SSD market where STEC has hit a billion dollar market capwhile startups are bragging about 500,000 IOPS and the storage equivalent ofpower too cheap to meter.

Since everyone in the storage industry, especially oldGeorge down the page, seems obsessed with the Data Domain bidding war the factthat STEC's stock hit $23 a share giving them a market cap of over a billiondollars or half a Data Domain should peak some folks attention as well. Evenconsidering that STEC's ZEUS IOPS drives lead the performance race and have wondesign wins from EMC, HP, Compellent and pretty much everyone else that willlet you put a handful of SSDs in a disk array their 208 P/E is well intonosebleed territory. After all DD closed today at a little over $32 (so themarket thinks EMC will hold up their paddle one more time) for a P/E of 107.

While ZEUS IOPS are impressively fast the single level cellflash technology they use makes them just a bit pricy with 36GB drives goingfor around $9000 on the street where Intel's X25-E, used by Pillar andEquallogic who do wide striping across SSDs so they can get by with the slowerbut still SLC flash, goes for under a thousand for 64GB. MLC flash is evencheaper but has significant limitations on write cycles and write performancemaking it suitable for laptops and USB keys but not production disk arrays evenin the midrange let alone the Syms and USP-Vs of the world.Startup SandForce is peddling a new set of flash memorycontrollers that they claim will allow SSD vendors to bundle up to 16 MLC chipsinto a redundant array of independent silicon elements (RAISE at least it's not3 letters) to provide twice the write IOPs of the Zeus IOPS at a substantiallylower price.  Now SandForce isn't makingSSDs just the controller chips so we haven't seen real production products andit could be more like a sandstorm than a SandForce but the promise of STECperformance at Samsung prices is intriguing.

The least interesting news from the SSD front this month wasWestern Digital's announcement of SiliconDrive III SATA and PATA drives.Frankly despite WD's assertions of unique technology with names like SolidStorand SiSmart that improve wear leveling and error correction these are MLC baseddevices better suited to notebooks than the data center.