An Israeli start-up named Kaminario is attacking Texas Memory Systems’ home turf with a DRAM SSD that offers speeds as fast as 1.5 million IOPS.  While TMS has built itself a comfortable niche business using custom hardware, Kaminario’s K2 SSD, announced on June 16, is made using standard off-the-shelf low-profile blade servers from Dell.  Only the software is proprietary.

DRAM SSDs are an interesting product that serves niches which flash SSDs are unlikely to penetrate.  Objective Analysis’ new report on Enterprise SSDs explores the price and speed dynamics that separate these two technologies.  See the Objective Analysis Reports page for more information.

Some of the K2’s internal servers are dedicated to handling I/O, and are called “io Directors.”  The bandwidth of the storage system scales linearly with the number of io Directors used – a pair of io Directors provides 300K IOPS, and ten io Directors will support 1.5M IOPS.  Below the io Directors are other servers called “Data Nodes” which manage the storage.  Capacity scales linearly with the addition of Data Nodes.  Today’s limit is 3.5TB, but this number will increase over time.

Redundancy is a key feature of the Kaminario K2: There are at least two of any device: io Directors, Data Nodes, and HDDs per Data Node, since the DRAM-based data is stored onto HDDs in the event of an unexpected power failure.  The system can communicate with the host through a range of interfaces, with FCOE offered at introduction.

Kaminario’s K2 boasts a significantly smaller footprint and price tag than HDD-based systems with competing IOPS levels.

To find out more about Kaminario visit Kaminario.com

Violin Memory introduced their 3000 series memory appliance in mid-May.  This million-plus-IOPS device piles 10-20 terabytes of NAND flash storage into a single 3U cabinet at a price that Violin’s management claims is equivalent to that of high-end storage arrays.

The system, introduced at $20/GB, or $200,000, is intended to provide enough storage at a low enough price to eliminate any need to manage hot data into and out of a limited number of small solid state drives.  Instead, Violin argues, the appliance’s capacity is big enough and cheap enough that an entire database can be economically stored within it, giving lightning-fast access to the entire database at once.

Note that Violin acquired Gear6 a month later, in mid-June.  This seems to reveal that the company is hedging its bets, taking advantage of a distressed caching company’s expertise to assure a strong position in architectures based upon a smaller memory appliance managed by caching software.

There is a good bit of detail about how and why both of these approaches make sense in Objective Analysis’ newest Enterprise SSD report.  See the Objective Analysis Reports page for more information.

But in regard to the Series 3000, CIOs whose databases are even larger than 10TB will be comforted to hear that Violin will be introducing appliances with as much as 60TB of storage by year-end.

Violin’s 3000 series can be configured through a communications module to support nearly any interface: Fibre Channel, 10Gb Ethernet, FCOE, PCIe, with Violin offering to support “Even InfiniBand, if asked.”  Inside are 84 modules, each built of a combination of DRAM and both SLC and MLC NAND flash, configured to assure data and pathway redundancy.

This high level of redundancy and fault management is one of Violin’s hallmarks.

Violin’s website is Violin-Memory.com

San Francisco’s Nimbus Data Systems launched a solid state storage system in late April that is intended to replace all the HDDs used in a system except for slow disks used in near line storage.  Nimbus holds a viewpoint that solid-state drives eliminate the need for fast disk storage, and that in future times all data centers will be built using only SSDs for speed and capacity drives (slow HDDs) for mass storage.  This viewpoint is gaining a growing following.

Nimbus’ S-Class Enterprise Flash Storage System uses a proprietary 6GB SAS flash module, rather than off-the-shelf SSDs, to keep the costs low in their systems.  Storage capacity is 2.5-5.0TB per 2U enclosure, and can be scaled up to 100TB.  Throughput is claimed to be 500K IOPS through 10Gb Ethernet connections.   Prices are roughly $8/GB.

Although Nimbus previously sold systems based on a mix of SSDs and HDDs, they have moved away from using HDDs, and expect for data center managers to adopt this new approach.

There’s merit to this argument, but it will probably take a few years before CIOs agree on the role of NAND flash vs. enterprise HDDs vs. capacity HDDs in the data center. There’s a lot more detail on the approaches being considered for flash in the enterprise data center in Objective Analysis’ new Enterprise SSD report.  See the Objective Analysis Reports page for more information.

You can find out more at  NimbusData.com

A new article, co-authored by myself and Tom Coughlin, can now be read from the SNIA Europe website.  “Solid State Drives for Energy Savings” explains the energy benefits that are being discovered when IT managers start to bring SSDs into their data centers. 

The article is a quick two pager, and it introduces SNIA’s new TCO Calculator (Total Cost of Ownership), a clever tool that helps estimate the power, rack space, and other savings that come along with a conversion of fast storage from enterprise HDDs to SSDs.

[Update: After clicking on the above link, it will be necessary to download the April 2010 edition of  Storage Networking Times, in order to read the article.]