SSD – Page 2 – Silverton Consulting

Thoughts on Spring SNW 2012 in Dallas

Posted on April 3, 2012April 10, 2012 by Ray in Block Storage, Cloud services, Cloud storage, Disk storage, SSD storage, Strategic Inflection Points

Viking Technology NAND/DIMM SSD 32TB/1U demo box

[Updated photo] Well the big news today was the tornado activity in the Dallas area. When the tornado warnings were announced customers were stuck on the exhibit floor and couldn’t leave (which made all the vendors very happy). Meetings with vendors still went on but were held in windowless rooms and took some ingenuity to get to. I offered to meet in the basement but was told I couldn’t go down there.

As for technology at the show, I was pretty impressed with the Viking booth. They had a 512GB MLC NAND flash card placed in spare DIMM slots with MLC or SLC NAND flash storage in them which takes power from the DIMM slot and uses a separate SATA cabling to cable the SSD storage together. It could easily be connected to a MegaRAID card and RAIDed together. The cards are mainly sold to OEMs but they are looking to gain some channel partners willing to sell them directly to end users.

In addition to the MLC NAND/DIMM card, they had a demo box with just a whole bunch of DIMM slots, where they modified the DIMM connections to also support SATA interface through their mother board. They had on display 1U storage box with 32TB of MLC NAND/DIMM cards and a single power supply supporting 6 lanes of SAS connectivity to the storage. Wasn’t clear what they were trying to do with this other than stimulate thought and interest from OEMs. It was a very interesting demo

There a few major vendors including Fujitsu, HDS, HP, and Oracle exhibiting at the show with a slew of minor ones as well. But noticeable by their absence was Dell, EMC, IBM, and NetApp not to mention Brocade, Cisco and Emulex.

Someone noticed that a lot of the smaller SSD startups weren’t here as well, e.g., no PureStorage, NexGen, SolidFire, Whiptail etc. Even FusionIO with their bank of video streams was missing from the show. In times past, smaller startups would use SNWto get vendor and end-user customer attention. I suppose nowadays, they do this at VMworld, Oracle Openworld, Sapphire or other vertical specific conferences.

Marc Farley of StorSimple discussing cloud storage

In the SSD space there was Nimbus Data, TMS, Micron and OCZ where here showing off their latest technology. Also, there were a few standard bearers like FalconStor, Veeam, Sepaton, Ultrium and Qlogic were exhibiting as well. A couple of pure cloud players as well like RackSpace, StorSimple and a new player Symform.

Didn’t get to attend any technical sessions today but made the keynote last night which was pretty good. That talk was all about how the CIO has to start playing offense and getting ahead of where the business is heading rather than playing defense playing catchup to where the business needed to be before.

SCI SPC-1 results analysis: Top 10 $/IOPS – chart-of-the-month

Posted on March 29, 2012October 8, 2012 by Ray in Block Storage, Disk storage, FC, IOPS, SPC-1, SSD storage, storage economics, Storage performance, Storage Performance Council, System effectiveness

Column chart showing the top 10 economically performing systems for SPC-1 — (SCISPC120226-003) (c) 2012 Silverton Consulting, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Lower is better on this chart. I can’t remember the last time we showed this Top 10 $/IOPS™ chart from the Storage Performance Council SPC-1 benchmark. Recall that we prefer our IOPS/$/GB which factors in subsystem size but this past quarter two new submissions ranked well on this metric. The two new systems were the all SSD Huawei Symantec Oceanspace™ Dorado2100 (#2) and the latest Fujitsu ETERNUS DX80 S2 storage (#7) subsystems.

Most of the winners on $/IOPS are SSD systems (#1-5 and 10) and most of these were all SSD storage system. These systems normally have better $/IOPS by hitting high IOPS™ rates for the cost of their storage. But they often submit relatively small systems to SPC-1 reducing system cost and helping them place better on $/IOPS.

On the other hand, some disk only storage do well by abandoning any form of protection as with the two Sun J4400 (#6) and J4200 (#8) storage systems which used RAID 0 but also had smaller capacities, coming in at 2.2TB and 1.2TB, respectively.

The other two disk only storage systems here, the Fujitsu ETERNUS DX80 S2 (#7) and the Huawei Symantec Oceanspace S2600 (#9) systems also had relatively small capacities at 9.7TB and 2.9TB respectively.

The ETERNUS DX80 S2 achieved ~35K IOPS and at a cost of under $80K generated a $2.25 $/IOPS. Of course, the all SSD systems blow that away, for example the Oceanspace Dorado2100 (#2), all SSD system hit ~100K IOPS but cost nearly $90K for a $0.90 $/IOPS.

Moreover, the largest capacity system here with 23.7TB of storage was the Oracle Sun ZFS (#10) hybrid SSD and disk system which generated ~137K IOPS at a cost of ~$410K hitting just under $3.00 $/IOPS.

Still prefer our own metric on economical performance but each has their flaws. The SPC-1 $/IOPS metric is dominated by SSD systems and our IOPS/$/GB metric is dominated by disk only systems. Probably some way to do better on the cost of performance but I have yet to see it.

~~~~

The full SPC performance report went out in SCI’s February newsletter. But a copy of the full report will be posted on our dispatches page sometime next month (if all goes well). However, you can get the full SPC performance analysis now and subscribe to future free newsletters by just sending us an email or using the signup form above right.

For a more extensive discussion of current SAN or block storage performance covering SPC-1 (top 30), SPC-2 (top 30) and ESRP (top 20) results please see SCI’s SAN Storage Buying Guide available on our website.

As always, we welcome any suggestions or comments on how to improve our analysis of SPC results or any of our other storage performance analyses.

Super Talent releases a 4-SSD, RAIDDrive PCIe card

Posted on March 9, 2012April 23, 2012 by Ray in SSD storage, Storage, System effectiveness

RAIDDrive UpStream (c) 2012 Super Talent (from their website)

Not exactly sure what is happening, but PCIe cards are coming out containing multiple SSD drives.

For example, the recently announced Super Talent RAIDDrive UpStream card contains 4 SAS embedded SSDs that can push storage capacity up to almost a TB of MLC NAND. They have an optional SLC version but there were no specs provided on this.

It looks like the card uses an LSI RAID controller and SANDforce NAND controller. Unlike the other RAIDDrive cards that support RAID5, the UpStream can be configured with RAID 0, 1 or 1E (sort of RAID 1 only striped across even or odd drive counts) and currently supports capacities of 220GB, 460GB or 960GB total.

Just like the rest of the RAIDDrive product line, the UpStream card is PCIe x8 connected and requires host software (drivers) for Windows, NetWare, Solaris and other OSs but not for “most Linux distributions”. Once the software is up, the RAIDDrive can be configured and then accessed just like any other “super fast” DAS device.

Super Talent’s data sheet states UpStream performance at are 1GB/sec Read and 900MB/Sec writes. However, I didn’t see any SNIA SSD performance test results so it’s unclear how well performance holds up over time and whether these performance levels can be independently verified.

It seems just year ago that I was reviewing Virident’s PCIe SSD along with a few others at Spring SNW. At the time, I thought there were a lot of PCIe NAND cards being shown at the show. Given Super Talent’s and the many other vendors sporting PCIe SSDs today, there’s probably going to be a lot more this time.

No pricing information was available.

~~~~

Comments?

Storage performance matters, even for smartphones

Posted on February 21, 2012April 10, 2012 by Ray in SSD storage, Storage, Storage performance, System effectiveness

Portrait of a Young Girl With an iPhone, after Agnolo Bronzino by Mike Licht,... (cc) (From Flickr)

Read an interesting article from MIT’s Technical Review about a study presented at last weeks Usenix FAST (File and Storage Technology) conference on How Data Storage Cripples Mobile Apps. It seems storage performance can seriously slow down smartphone functioning, not unlike IT applications (see IO throughput vs. response time and why it matters post for more).

The smartphone research was done by NEC. They took an Android phone and modified the O/S to use an external memory card for all of the App data needs.

Then they ran a number of Apps through their paces with various external memory cards. It turned out that depending on the memory card in use, the mobile phones email and Twitter Apps launched 2-3X faster. Also, the native web App was tested with over 50 pages loads and had at best, a 3X faster page load time.

All the tests were done using a cable to simulate advanced network connections, above and beyond today’s capabilities and to eliminate that as the performance bottleneck. In the end, faster networking didn’t have as much of a bearing on App performance as memory card speed.

(NAND) memory card performance

The problem, it turns out is due to data writes. It seems that the non-volatile memory used in most external memory cards is NAND flash, which as is we all know, has much slower write time than read time, almost 1000X (see my post on Why SSD performance is such a mystery). Most likely the memory cards are pretty “dumb” so many performance boosting techniques used in enterprise class SSDs are not available (e.g., DRAM write buffering).

Data caching helps

The researchers did another experiment with the phone, using a more sophisticated version of data caching and a modified Facebook App. Presumably, this new “data caching” minimized the data write penalty by caching writes to DRAM first and only destaging data to NAND flash when absolutely necessary. By using the more sophisticated “data caching” they were able to speed up the modified Facebook App by 4X.

It seems that storage sophistication matters even in smartphones, I think I am going to need to have someone port the caching portions of Data ONTAP® or Enginuity™ to run on my iPhone.

Comments?

Why EMC is doing Project Lightening and Thunder

Posted on February 7, 2012April 10, 2012 by Ray in Data efficiency, Distributed computing, Market dynamics, Scenario planning, SSD storage, Storage performance, Strategic Inflection Points, Strategic planning, System effectiveness, Visionary leadershp

Picture of atmospheric lightening striking ground near a building at night — rayo 3 by El Garza (cc) (from Flickr)

Although technically Project Lightening and Thunder represent some interesting offshoots of EMC software, hardware and system prowess, I wonder why they would decide to go after this particular market space.

There are plenty of alternative offerings in the PCIe NAND memory card space. Moreover, the PCIe card caching functionality, while interesting is not that hard to replicate and such software capability is not a serious barrier of entry for HP, IBM, NetApp and many, many others. And the margins cannot be that great.

So why get into this low margin business?

I can see a couple of reasons why EMC might want to do this.

Believing in the commoditization of storage performance. I have had this debate with a number of analysts over the years but there remain many out there that firmly believe that storage performance will become a commodity sooner, rather than later. By entering the PCIe NAND card IO buffer space, EMC can create a beachhead in this movement that helps them build market awareness, higher manufacturing volumes, and support expertise. As such, when the inevitable happens and high margins for enterprise storage start to deteriorate, EMC will be able to capitalize on this hard won, operational effectiveness.
Moving up the IO stack. From an applications IO request to the disk device that actually services it is a long journey with multiple places to make money. Currently, EMC has a significant share of everything that happens after the fabric switch whether it is FC, iSCSI, NFS or CIFS. What they don’t have is a significant share in the switch infrastructure or anywhere on the other (host side) of that interface stack. Yes they have Avamar, Networker, Documentum, and other software that help manage, secure and protect IO activity together with other significant investments in RSA and VMware. But these represent adjacent market spaces rather than primary IO stack endeavors. Lightening represents a hybrid software/hardware solution that moves EMC up the IO stack to inside the server. As such, it represents yet another opportunity to profit from all the IO going on in the data center.
Making big data more effective. The fact that Hadoop doesn’t really need or use high end storage has not been lost to most storage vendors. With Lightening, EMC has a storage enhancement offering that can readily improve Hadoop cluster processing. Something like Lightening’s caching software could easily be tailored to enhance HDFS file access mode and thus, speed up cluster processing. If Hadoop and big data are to be the next big consumer of storage, then speeding cluster processing will certainly help and profiting by doing this only makes sense.
Believing that SSDs will transform storage. To many of us the age of disks is waning. SSDs, in some form or another, will be the underlying technology for the next age of storage. The densities, performance and energy efficiency of current NAND based SSD technology are commendable but they will only get better over time. The capabilities brought about by such technology will certainly transform the storage industry as we know it, if they haven’t already. But where SSD technology actually emerges is still being played out in the market place. Many believe that when industry transitions like this happen it’s best to be engaged everywhere change is likely to happen, hoping that at least some of them will succeed. Perhaps PCIe SSD cards may not take over all server IO activity but if it does, not being there or being late will certainly hurt a company’s chances to profit from it.

There may be more reasons I missed here but these seem to be the main ones. Of the above, I think the last one, SSD rules the next transition is most important to EMC.

They have been successful in the past during other industry transitions. If anything they have shown similar indications with their acquisitions by buying into transitions if they don’t own them, witness Data Domain, RSA, and VMware. So I suspect the view in EMC is that doubling down on SSDs will enable them to ride out the next storm and be in a profitable place for the next change, whatever that might be.

And following lightening, Project Thunder

Similarly, Project Thunder seems to represent EMC doubling their bet yet again on the SSDs. Just about every month I talk to another storage startup coming out in the market providing another new take on storage using every form of SSD imaginable.

However, Project Thunder as envisioned today is not storage, but rather some form of external shared memory. I have heard this before, in the IBM mainframe space about 15-20 years ago. At that time shared external memory was going to handle all mainframe IO processing and the only storage left was going to be bulk archive or migration storage – a big threat to the non-IBM mainframe storage vendors at the time.

One problem then was that the shared DRAM memory of the time was way more expensive than sophisticated disk storage and the price wasn’t coming down fast enough to counteract increased demand. The other problem was making shared memory work with all the existing mainframe applications was not easy. IBM at least had control over the OS, HW and most of the larger applications at the time. Yet they still struggled to make it usable and effective, probably some lesson here for EMC.

Fast forward 20 years and NAND based SSDs are the right hardware technology to make inexpensive shared memory happen. In addition, the road map for NAND and other SSD technologies looks poised to continue the capacity increase and price reductions necessary to compete effectively with disk in the long run.

However, the challenges then and now seem as much to do with software that makes shared external memory universally effective as with the hardware technology to implement it. Providing a new storage tier in Linux, Windows and/or VMware is easier said than done. Most recent successes have usually been offshoots of SCSI (iSCSI, FCoE, etc). Nevertheless, if it was good for mainframes then, it certainly good for Linux, Windows and VMware today.

And that seems to be where Thunder is heading, I think.

Comments?

Latest SPECsfs2008 results, over 1 million NFS ops/sec – chart-of-the-month

Posted on February 3, 2012August 19, 2016 by Ray in Clustered storage, Ethernet, File Storage, NFS throughput, SPECsfs, SPECsfs2008, SSD storage, Storage drive, Storage performance, System effectiveness

Column chart showing the top 10 NFS througput operations per second for SPECsfs2008 — (SCISFS111221-001) (c) 2011 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

[We are still catching up on our charts for the past quarter but this one brings us up to date through last month]

There’s just something about a million SPECsfs2008(r) NFS throughput operations per second that kind of excites me (weird, I know). Yes it takes over 44-nodes of Avere FXT 3500 with over 6TB of DRAM cache, 140-nodes of EMC Isilon S200 with almost 7TB of DRAM cache and 25TB of SSDs or at least 16-nodes of NetApp FAS6240 in Data ONTAP 8.1 cluster mode with 8TB of FlashCache to get to that level.

Nevertheless, a million NFS throughput operations is something worth celebrating. It’s not often one achieves a 2X improvement in performance over a previous record. Something significant has changed here.

The age of scale-out

We have reached a point where scaling systems out can provide linear performance improvements, at least up to a point. For example, the EMC Isilon and NetApp FAS6240 had a close to linear speed up in performance as they added nodes indicating (to me at least) there may be more there if they just throw more storage nodes at the problem. Although maybe they saw some drop off and didn’t wish to show the world or potentially the costs became prohibitive and they had to stop someplace. On the other hand, Avere only benchmarked their 44-node system with their current hardware (FXT 3500), they must have figured winning the crown was enough.

However, I would like to point out that throwing just any hardware at these systems doesn’t necessary increase performance. Previously (see my CIFS vs NFS corrected post), we had shown the linear regression for NFS throughput against spindle count and although the regression coefficient was good (~R**2 of 0.82), it wasn’t perfect. And of course we eliminated any SSDs from that prior analysis. (Probably should consider eliminating any system with more than a TB of DRAM as well – but this was before the 44-node Avere result was out).

Speaking of disk drives, the FAS6240 system nodes had 72-450GB 15Krpm disks, the Isilon nodes had 24-300GB 10Krpm disks and each Avere node had 15-600GB 7.2Krpm SAS disks. However the Avere system also had a 4-Solaris ZFS file storage systems behind it each of which had another 22-3TB (7.2Krpm, I think) disks. Given all that, the 16-node NetApp system, 140-node Isilon and the 44-node Avere systems had a total of 1152, 3360 and 748 disk drives respectively. Of course, this doesn’t count the system disks for the Isilon and Avere systems nor any of the SSDs or FlashCache in the various configurations.

I would say with this round of SPECsfs2008 benchmarks scale-out NAS systems have come out. It’s too bad that both NetApp and Avere didn’t release comparable CIFS benchmark results which would have helped in my perennial discussion on CIFS vs. NFS.

But there’s always next time.

~~~~

The full SPECsfs2008 performance report went out to our newsletter subscriber’s last December. A copy of the full report will be up on the dispatches page of our site sometime later this month (if all goes well). However, you can see our full SPECsfs2008 performance analysis now and subscribe to our free monthly newsletter to receive future reports directly by just sending us an email or using the signup form above right.

For a more extensive discussion of file and NAS storage performance covering top 30 SPECsfs2008 results and NAS storage system features and functionality, please consider purchasing our NAS Buying Guide available from SCI’s website.

As always, we welcome any suggestions on how to improve our analysis of SPECsfs2008 results or any of our other storage system performance discussions.

Comments?

Will Hybrid drives conquer enterprise storage?

Posted on December 1, 2011April 10, 2012 by Ray in Block Storage, Disk storage, File Storage, SSD storage, Storage architecture, Storage Features, Storage performance, Strategic Inflection Points, System effectiveness

Toyota Hybrid Synergy Drive Decal: RAC Future Car Challenge by Dominic's pics (cc) (from Flickr)

I saw where Seagate announced the next generation of their Momentus XT Hybrid (SSD & Disk) drive this week. We haven’t discussed Hybrid drives much on this blog but it has become a viable product family.

I am not planning on describing the new drive specs here as there was an excellent review by Greg Schulz at StorageIOblog.

However, the question some in the storage industry have had is can Hybrid drives supplant data center storage. I believe the answer to that is no and I will tell you why.

Hybrid drive secrets

The secret to Seagate’s Hybrid drive lies in its FAST technology. It provides a sort of automated disk caching that moves frequently accessed OS or boot data to NAND/SSD providing quicker access times.

Storage subsystem caching logic has been around in storage subsystems for decade’s now, ever since the IBM 3880 Mod 11&13 storage control systems came out last century. However, these algorithms have gotten much more sophisticated over time and today can make a significant difference in storage system performance. This can be easily witnessed by the wide variance in storage system performance on a per disk drive basis (e.g., see my post on Latest SPC-2 results – chart of the month).

Enterprise storage use of Hybrid drives?

The problem with using Hybrid drives in enterprise storage is that caching algorithms are based on some predictability of access/reference patterns. When you have a Hybrid drive directly connected to a server or a PC it can view a significant portion of server IO (at least to the boot/OS volume) but more importantly, that boot/OS data is statically allocated, i.e., doesn’t move around all that much. This means that one PC session looks pretty much like the next PC session and as such, the hybrid drive can learn an awful lot about the next IO session just by remembering the last one.

However, enterprise storage IO changes significantly from one storage session (day?) to another. Not only are the end-user generated database transactions moving around the data, but the data itself is much more dynamically allocated, i.e., moves around a lot.

Backend data movement is especially true for automated storage tiering used in subsystems that contain both SSDs and disk drives. But it’s also true in systems that map data placement using log structured file systems. NetApp Write Anywhere File Layout (WAFL) being a prominent user of this approach but other storage systems do this as well.

In addition, any fixed, permanent mapping of a user data block to a physical disk location is becoming less useful over time as advanced storage features make dynamic or virtualized mapping a necessity. Just consider snapshots based on copy-on-write technology, all it takes is a write to have a snapshot block be moved to a different location.

Nonetheless, the main problem is that all the smarts about what is happening to data on backend storage primarily lies at the controller level not at the drive level. This not only applies to data mapping but also end-user/application data access, as cache hits are never even seen by a drive. As such, Hybrid drives alone don’t make much sense in enterprise storage.

Maybe, if they were intricately tied to the subsystem

I guess one way this could all work better is if the Hybrid drive caching logic were somehow controlled by the storage subsystem. In this way, the controller could provide hints as to which disk blocks to move into NAND. Perhaps this is a way to distribute storage tiering activity to the backend devices, without the subsystem having to do any of the heavy lifting, i.e., the hybrid drives would do all the data movement under the guidance of the controller.

I don’t think this likely because it would take industry standardization to define any new “hint” commands and they would be specific to Hybrid drives. Barring standards, it’s an interface between one storage vendor and one drive vendor. Probably ok if you made both storage subsystem and hybrid drives but there aren’t any vendor’s left that does both drives and the storage controllers.

~~~~

So, given the state of enterprise storage today and its continuing proclivity to move data around accross its backend storage, I believe Hybrid drives won’t be used in enterprise storage anytime soon.

Comments?

SSD news roundup

Posted on November 8, 2011April 10, 2012 by Ray in Block Storage, Cloud services, Cloud storage, Data QoS, Data reduction, Ethernet, SSD storage, Storage Features, Storage performance, Strategic Inflection Points, System effectiveness

The NexGen n5 Storage System (c) 2011 NexGen Storage, All Rights Reserved

NexGen comes out of stealth

NexGen Storage a local storage company came out of stealth today and is also generally available. Their storage system has been in beta since April 2011 and is in use by a number of customers today.

Their product uses DRAM caching, PCIe NAND flash, and nearline SAS drives to provide guaranteed QoS for LUN I/O. The system can provision IOP rate, bandwidth and (possibly) latency over a set of configured LUNs. Such provisioning can change using policy management on a time basis to support time-based tiering. Also, one can prioritize how important the QoS is for a LUN so that it could be guaranteed or could be sacrificed to support performance for other storage system LUNs.

The NexGen storage provides a multi-tiered hybrid storage system that supports 10GBE iSCSI, and uses MLC NAND PCIe card to boost performance for SAS nearline drives. NexGen also supports data deduplication which is done during off-peak times to reduce data footprint.

DRAM replacing Disk!?

In a report by ARS Technica, a research group out of Stanford is attempting to gang together server DRAM to create a networked storage system. There have been a number of attempts to use DRAM as a storage system in the past but the Stanford group is going after it in a different way by aggregating together DRAM across a gaggle of servers. They are using standard disks or SSDs for backup purposes because DRAM is, of course, a volatile storage device but the intent is to keep all in memory to speed up performance.

I was at SNW USA a couple of weeks ago talking to a Taiwanese company that was offering a DRAM storage accelerator device which also used DRAM as a storage service. Of course, Texas Memory Systems and others have had DRAM based storage for a while now. The cost for such devices was always pretty high but the performance was commensurate.

In contrast, the Stanford group is trying to use commodity hardware (servers) with copious amounts of DRAM, to create a storage system. The article seems to imply that the system could take advantage of unused DRAM, sitting around your server farm. But, I find it hard to believe that. Most virtualized server environments today are running lean on memory and there shouldn’t be a lot of excess DRAM capacity hanging around.

The other achilles heel of the Stanford DRAM storage is that it is highly dependent on low latency networking. Although Infiniband probably qualifies as low latency, it’s not low latency enough to support this systems IO workloads. As such, they believe they need even lower latency networking than Infiniband to make it work well.

OCZ ups the IOP rate on their RevoDrive3 Max series PCIe NAND storage

Speaking of PCIe NAND flash, OCZ just announced speedier storage, upping the random read IO rates up to 245K from the 230K IOPS offered in their previous PCIe NAND storage. Unclear what they did to boost this but, it’s entirely possible that they have optimized their NAND controller to support more random reads.

OCZ announces they will ship TLC SSD storage in 2012

OCZ’s been busy. Now that the enterprise is moving to adopt MLC and eMLC SSD storage, it seems time to introduce TLC (3-bits/cell) SSDs. With TLC, the price should come down a bit more (see chart in article), but the endurance should also suffer significantly. I suppose with the capacities available with TLC and enough over provisioning OCZ can make a storage device that would be reliable enough for certain applications at a more reasonable cost.

I never thought I would see MLC in enterprise storage so, I suppose at some point even TLC makes sense, but I would be even more hesitant to jump on this bandwagon for awhile yet.

Solid Fire obtains more funding

Early last week Solid Fire, another local SSD startup obtained $25M in additional funding. Solid Fire, an all SSD storage system company, is still technically in beta but expect general availability near the end of the year. We haven’t talked about them before in RayOnStorage but they are focusing on cloud service providers with an all SSD solution which includes deduplication. I promise to talk about them some more when they reach GA.

LaCIE introduces a Little Big Disk, a Thunderbolt SSD

Finally, in the highend consumer space, LaCie just released a new SSD which attaches to servers/desktops using the new Apple-Intel Thunderbolt IO interface. Given the expense (~$900) for 128GB SSD, it seems a bit much but if you absolutely have to have the performance this may be the only way to go.

—-

Well that’s about all I could find on SSD and DRAM storage announcements. However, I am sure I missed a couple so if you know one I should have mentioned please comment.