Storage Products of the Year 2013: Storage Infrastructure Product of the Year

QLogic Corp.'s first product release from its Mt. Rainier server-side PCI Express (PCIe) flash cache-pooling technology is our 2013 storage infrastructure Product of the Year. Our judges scored the QLogic FabricCache 10000 Series host bus adapter (HBA) highest in innovation and performance among the four category finalists to give QLogic the top prize for a second year in a row.

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Slack: How NAND flash degrades and what vendors do to increase SSD endurance

Solid-state drives (SSDs) and PCI Express (PCIe) flash cards are becoming commonly adopted in storage products and servers, but questions remain about flash storage's endurance and life span. In this podcast, Storage Switzerland senior analyst Eric Slack discusses the technical aspects of how NAND flash storage degrades and what vendors are doing to increase SSD endurance.

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LSI releases dual interface flash controller, 12 Gbps SAS cards

LSI Corp. has been busy upgrading its flash product lines, pushing out new SandForce and MegaRAID flash controllers last week.

LSI introduced its SandForce (SF) 3700 series flash controllers and filled out its 12 Gbps Serial-Attached SCSI (SAS) MegaRAID product line. The SandForce 3700 provides native support for PCI-Express and 6 Gbps Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (SATA) interfaces. The latest MegaRAID products are the SAS 9300 controller cards and the 12 Gbps SAS expanders.

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Fusion-io bundles ioControl hybrid array with server flash

Fusion-io extended the hybrid flash storage array platform it gained by acquiring NexGen Storage in April, adding a bundle that brings server caching to the array.

The Server Performance Extension (SPX) bundles provide flash from host to storage for ioControl iSCSI arrays. Fusion-io also released ioControl 3.0, an updated version of the software that enables storage quality of service (QoS) on the arrays.

In April 2013, Fusion-io acquired NexGen for $119 million, giving the PCIe flash pioneer its first storage array platform.

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Smart Storage goes DIMM with memory channel storage

Smart Storage Systems this week released a server-side memory channel storage card using technology from Diablo Technologies Inc.

Smart's ULLtraDIMM flash storage boards sit in the motherboard's dual in-line memory module (DIMM) slots and use memory channel lanes for system connections. The vendor claims its cards have much lower and more consistent latency than traditional PCI Express (PCIe) flash cards or SATA and SAS solid-state drive (SSD) connections.

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PernixData virtualizes server-side flash caching

PernixData Inc. this week launched its server-side Flash Virtualization Platform, which allows organizations to share flash caching across clustered servers running VMware.

The Flash Virtualization Platform (FVP) lets any server running the software to access flash resources installed on another host in the cluster. FVP installs into the VMware vSphere kernel, uses the same resources as the vSphere hypervisor, and can piggyback on the vMotion virtual network. The software is managed as a tab in vCenter.

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LSI Nytro PCIe cards get capacity, feature upgrades

LSI Corp. expanded its Nytro application-acceleration product line this week with a 3.2 TB WarpDrive PCI Express (PCIe) flash card and two new MegaRAID PCIe intelligent flash acceleration and storage cards.

The LSI Nytro application-acceleration product line features PCIe cards with multiple form factors that can connect internally to direct-attached storage or externally to SANs with both SATA and SAS interfaces.

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Law firm uses NexGen hybrid array to keep cases moving

Chief Information Officer Rich Wills said he doesn't consider his law firm on the cutting edge of technology. But rapid data growth pushed Keating Muething & Klekamp PLL (KMK) to buy a hybrid flash array from startup NexGen Storage Inc. when traditional hard drive arrays failed to keep up with his IOPS requirements.

"We're a law firm," Wills said. "We don't really do new stuff. Cutting-edge [technology] and law firms do not necessarily exist in the same technology plan."

However, data growth and e-discovery are common in law firms, and that was the case with Cincinnati, Ohio-based KMK.

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Micron ships first MLC PCIe flash card

Micron Technology Inc. has expanded its flash product line with its first MLC PCIe Express NAND card, two years after launching its first SLC PCIe flash card.

The P420m multi-level cell (MLC) card should help Micron sales because MLC cards are more commonly deployed than single-level cell (SLC) in the enterprise. MLC cards are cheaper than SLC and software enhancements have improved MLC's reliability and performance. Micron was slow to the MLC market, as most of its major competitors already have MLC PCIe flash cards.

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Kaminario K2 flash array replaces PCIe with SAS SSDs

Kaminario this week launched new versions of its K2 all-flash arrays and operating system, bringing out a modular 1U design while switching from PCI Express flash cards to hot-swappable SAS solid-state drives.

The startup uses commodity hardware and its SPEAR (Scale out Performance and Resilient Architecture) OS to build its Kaminario K2 arrays.

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Intel to sell LSI Nytro MegaRAID PCIe flash cards

LSI Corp. and Intel Corp. today expanded their OEM partnership to include the LSI Nytro MegaRAID PCI Express flash card. Intel will sell the server-side flash device with two of its RAID solid-state drive storage cache controllers.

LSI's Nytro MegaRAID PCI Express cards sit in the server PCIe slots to accelerate storage directly attached to the server. Intel previously offered LSI MegaRAID controller cards for SATA, SAS or solid-state application acceleration with RAID-on-chip data protection technology. Nytro MegaRAID cards add on-board NAND flash, SandForce flash storage processors and intelligent caching for faster application acceleration. LSI acquired flash controller chip vendor SandForce in October 2011.

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Storage Radio: SSD vs. HDD, QLogic and more

This week's edition of Storage Radio focuses on a network-led, server-side flashing product and the solid-state drive versus hard disk drive comparisons many users are making.

Storage Media Group senior news director Dave Raffo and news writer Todd Erickson spoke with associate site editor John Hilliard about solid-state drive (SSD) adoption and hard disk drive (HDD) purchasing decisions, as well as Erickson's story this week on QLogic Corp. and it's server-side-flash cache-sharing technology.

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