HGST pumps out 12 Gbps SAS SSDs

Western Digital Corp.'s HGST subsidiary this week launched what it claims are the industry's first 12 Gbps SAS solid-state drives.

The 25 nm Ultrastar drives use multi-level cell NAND flash and range in capacities from 200 GB to 1 TB. HGST is pitching the drives for high-performance applications, such as online banking, big data analytics and cloud computing.

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STEC launches 2 TB SSD, PCIe card for bulk storage

STEC Inc. today became the first enterprise storage system provider to offer 2-terabyte enterprise solid-state storage devices today, with the introduction of its s1120 PCI Express card and s840 SAS solid-state drive.

The s1120 is a half-height, half-length PCI Express card (PCIe card) based on STEC's proprietary ASIC controller. The company claims its CellCare flash management technology uses advanced digital signal processing, or DSP, and media management techniques to improve flash endurance by up to 13 times. STEC's on-card data protection features include RAID-like Secure Array of Flash Element (SAFE) technology and full power backup.

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ViaWest chooses SolidFire flash array for performance, storage QoS

Denver-based cloud service provider ViaWest turned to a SolidFire all-flash array for the underlying storage of its cloud to improve performance and management.

Matt Wallace, ViaWest's director of cloud architecture, knew an all-flash array would give him a performance boost, but he also needed to manage that performance for multiple customers. That led him to SolidFire, which offers granular quality of service (QoS) for its flash arrays aimed at cloud providers.

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Nimble Storage hybrid array improves law firm's VDI performance

When traditional spinning disk arrays came up short on performance for its virtual desktop infrastructure, Minneapolis-based law firm Lindquist & Vennum switched to a hybrid array from Nimble Storage Inc.

The Nimble Storage hybrid array's solid-state drives (SSDs) provide enough performance for the company's 350 persistent virtual desktops, as well as other applications.

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QLogic prepares server-side flash cache adapter cards

QLogic Corp. today announced a new host bus adapter (HBA) technology that will allow better management and sharing of server-side flash solid-state storage caching resources across connected servers. QLogic's Mt. Rainier HBA looks like a typical adapter to the server operating system, but it combines the HBA driver, solid-state disk (SSD) driver and filter driver on one card.

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NexGen Storage offers performance guarantee for hybrid storage array

NexGen Storage Inc. today declared it will back up its performance claims with a promise to upgrade customers for free if its hybrid solid-state storage array falls short. NexGen guarantees that its n5-150 combination PCI Express (PCIe) solid-state and hard disk drive array will increase the performance of a customer's previous disk storage system by 10 times, triple the IOPS per rack unit of hybrid storage arrays, or triple the raw capacity per rack unit of all-SSD arrays. Read more

Upcoming Nimbus all-flash storage array to offer 10-year warranty

Nimbus Data Systems Inc. today said its third-generation all-flash storage array will include a new process and significant improvements in speed and capacity when it is released later this year. The Gemini flash array can scale to 48 TB in a 2U device. Nimbus claims it can sustain 1,000,000 IOPS and will offer a 10-year warranty -- about twice as long as the expected maximum life of most flash systems. Read more

SanDisk releases FlashSoft flash caching software for vSphere

SanDisk Corp. today introduced the VMware vSphere server virtualization version of its FlashSoft flash caching software, which is designed to accelerate application performance and virtual machine (VM) density. FlashSoft released Windows Server and Linux versions of the flash caching software prior to its acquisition by SanDisk in February 2012. Read more

Tegile adds all-flash array to multiprotocol storage lineup

Tegile Systems today added an all-flash array and a higher-end hybrid solid-state drive (SSD) system to the startup's Zebi lineup of multiprotocol storage arrays. Tegile upgraded its controller to support an all-SSD array, and its metadata-accelerated storage system (MASS) now includes the option to pin volumes to SSDs to improve performance and minimize delays due to caching algorithms or tiering policies. Read more

Skyera releases all-flash array for $3 per gigabyte

Startup Skyera Inc. entered the all-flash enterprise storage market today with a series of iSCSI arrays that use consumer-grade multi-level cell (MLC) NAND to bring the price to less than $3 per gigabyte. And that price is before deduplication and compression. CEO and founder Radoslav Danilak said the vendor dropped the price to about one-third or less than most enterprise flash storage systems by improving the life of the consumer-grade MLC instead of using more expensive single-level cell (SLC) flash. Read more

Nimble builds hybrid solid-state storage to scale

Nimble Storage this week adopted a scale-out architecture for its hybrid solid-state drive (SSD) iSCSI SAN arrays, adding a performance platform and a series of expansion shelves to grow capacity. The CS400 series of arrays and ES expansion shelves are the key hardware pieces of what Nimble calls a "scale to fit" architecture. The new Nimble OS 2.0 enables scale-out clustering with any of the vendor's storage products. Read more

CloudSigma offers SLA-guaranteed SSD cloud

CloudSigma AG, a Zurich, Switzerland-based cloud computing service provider, is adding a solid-state drive (SSD) cloud storage service backed by service-level agreements (SLAs) for performance and availability. CloudSigma launched the cloud service in a private beta program this week, and plans to make it generally available later this year. Read more

Iomega launches SMB multiprotocol storage with SSD support, dedupe

EMC’s Iomega Corp. today launched the StorCenter px12-350r, a 12-bay rackmount small- to medium-sized business (SMB) multiprotocol storage array with solid-state drive (SSD) support and built-in data deduplication for backup. The 2U system comes a day after rival Drobo officially launched a similar 12-bay rackmount system with SSD support for SMBs.

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Drobo launches SMB SSD system with auto-tiering storage

Small- to medium-sized business (SMB) storage specialist Drobo Inc. has launched its first rackmount system, a 12-bay iSCSI model that supports solid-state drives (SSDs) and built-in automated tiering. The B1200i 3U system is the largest of Drobo’s series of products for SMBs, branch offices and prosumers.

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Iomega’s PX Series SMB NAS devices support SSDs, 3 TB drives

EMC Corp.’s Iomega today launched its StorCenter PX Series of network-attached storage (NAS) devices for small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) with solid-state drive (SSD) support, user-swappable 3 TB drives and dual-core processors.

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Fusion-io drives I/O solid-state storage and memory to the operating system

Fusion-io today introduced its newest generation solid-state storage software stack, the ioMemory Virtual Storage Layer (VSL). Fusion-io characterizes the ioMemory VSL as a hybrid operating system subsystem that combines the block-level reading and writing benefits of an I/O subsystem with the virtual addressing benefits of a virtual memory subsystem.

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Symantec Veritas Storage Foundation V5.1 has solid-state drive auto-discovery, thin volume reclaim

Symantec Corp. is beefing up its storage resource management software by enhancing visibility for solid-state drives (SSDs), strengthening its thin provisioning capabilities, adding integration with Microsoft Corp.'s Hyper-V and improving application recovery in the Veritas Cluster File System.

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SandForce seeks to improve SSD controllers

SandForce Inc., a silicon provider for solid-state drive (SSD) OEMs, emerged from stealth mode today with a line of processors for SSD controllers it claims will improve the reliability and endurance of NAND Flash-based drives.

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