This week (starting today – Tues 11th Aug) there is a Flash Memory Summit in Santa Clara.
I would have loved to attend this, as there is a whole day’s track on Flash in Enterprise Storage today, and a morning of tutorials on SSD’s in Enterprise Storage on Wednesday morning, as well as some keynote sessions on Flash technology.
Unfortunately I could not justify to the wife, the cost of flights, hotel and summit fee, as it would have been at my expense. She would just think I wanted another holiday, as she thinks these conferences and summits are all talk and play.
Attending the Flash in Enterprise Storage track would have been really interesting, to see what everyone had to say about this rapidly developing area of enterprise storage. If you do attend I would love to hear a summary of what was presented and discussed.
Plenty has been written by analysts, consultants, media and vendors on Flash Drives / SSD’s since EMC’s announcement of its plans to support solid state drives (SSD’s) in DMX-4 back in Jan 2008 (EMC uses the term Flash drives, or Enterprise Flash drives rather than SSD’s).
Whilst at EMC, and since leaving EMC I have watched with great interest the ‘war of words’ between storage vendors who had announced support for SSD’s, and those that had not, and how this has played out as storage vendors have gradually announced their support for SSD’s over the last 20 months since EMC’s announcement. Most storage array vendors now support SSD’s in some form, or have announced their intention to do so.
So it is with interest, when I read a flyer on STEC’s website stating they have signed a $120 Million Supply Agreement for ZeusIOPS SSD’s (their enterprise class SLC based SSD) for 2H 2009, and are now forecasting total sales of these Flash drives to exceed $220 million in 2009 !
Now I don’t know what actual mix of SSD capacities they expect to sell in 2009, but revenue of $220 Million sounds a big number to me, which I assume translates into a fairly large number of SSD's. I honestly don’t know what Compellent, EMC, Fujitsu, Hitachi, HP, IBM and anyone else using STEC SSD’s, are paying for their drives, and it obviously depends on the capacity of the drive, which can now be up to 750GB, and the volume of drives they commit to. From some simple maths (UK English !), taking a guess at the cost of the SSD's, it must mean they are expecting to ship 10’s of thousands of SSD’s before the end of the year.
Here is where I wish I had followed my instincts at the beginning of this year when the STEC share price hit a low of $3.67. They had been recently trading around the $34-$35 mark, but have just dropped back to around $30-$31. Still over an 8 fold increase in value in 8 months! I can only assume there are some very happy investors, whilst I am left kicking myself.
So based on STEC’s public statements there certainly now seems to be growing demand for SSD’s within the storage market. This shows how quickly the market can move from when EMC first announced Flash drives on 14th Jan 2008, and started shipping at the end of March 2008 with the GA of 5773 code that supported Flash drives in DMX-4, later in the year support for Flash in Clariion (CX4), and this year with the GA of V-Max in April. And with the other storage array vendors now shipping SSD’s, it would now appear customers are now taking the plunge and purchasing some SSD’s for their storage arrays.
It is interesting that most storage vendors have followed EMC’s lead and initially chosen the STEC Zeus drive, though I am sure many storage vendors are in talks with the other SSD manufacturers to second source, given the other major name companies that are now shipping or developing SSD’s. The likes of Hitachi, Intel, Micron, Samsung and Seagate to name a few, have entered or are entering the Enterprise SSD market.
Interestingly companies such as EqualLogic introduced support for a 50GB Samsung SLC based SSD with a SATA interface in March of this year for its PS6000 series storage array, which from a quick check on Samsung’s website is a 2.5”, rather than 3.5” drive. For the record STEC do also offer a 2.5” version of their Zeus SSD drive. The Samsung SLC based SSD is a lower performing (lower IOPS / MB/s thoughput) drive than the STEC drive, and also a lower cost. So note, Enterprise Class SSD’s are not all equal. Something I will expand on in a follow on blog post.
Now I will openly state I am a fan of Flash. It is an amazing technology when you really think how much information (bits/bytes) is stored inside each Flash chip, and I believe, Flash memory has, and will continue to dramatically change storage arrays other the coming years. Note I say a fan of Flash memory and not Flash drives, though I do think Flash drives are great to.
My personal experience, from when I was at EMC, in 2008 and the first part of 2009 was that there was great customer interest in SSD’s, as I spent many hours presenting and talking with customers about SSD’s and Flash memory and the business impact and benefit SSD’s could have, however not many customers purchased SSD’s for DMX-4 during 2008. I often said to customers, it is not if you should implement SSD’s, it is when. I will also come back to this in a future blog post.
Since I started writing this post, I have found a number of interesting whitepapers on SSD’s that have been recently published, either directly written by vendors or by analysts sponsored by vendors, and rather than post one massive post, as this was turning into, I now plan break it up and delay publishing the rest of what I have already written, and expand on it further.
So stay tuned for parts 2 and 3, and perhaps even part 4 where I will enter into discussion/debate about how and where SSD’s should be used, the impact of SSD’s on storage arrays, and how I see future storage arrays and Flash evolving.
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