News

posted on 15 August 2008 08:28

BiTMICRO has a Fibre Channel interface solid state drive (SSD) product being received by a tier 1 storage OEM in October.

Currently STEC is the only supplier of SSDs to tier 1 storage OEMs, meaning EMC, and reckons it has a 12-month lead over everybody else.

BiTMICRO has both 3.5-inch and 2.5-inch format SSDs. Here are the outline specifications:

E-Disk Altima 3.5" 4Gbit/s Fibre Channel Solid State Drive
- Up to 1.6TB of Flash
- Up to 55,000 IOPS
- Up to 230MB/sec Sustained
- 800 MB/sec Burst Rate
- 30-100 µsec Access Time

E-Disk Altima 2.5" 3Gbit/s SAS Solid State Drive
- 8 to 416Gb
- Up to 230MB/sec Sustained
- 300 MB/sec Burst Rate
- Up to 55,000 IOPS I/O Rate
- 30-100 µsec Access Time

STEC's 3.5-inch Zeus IOPS SSD offers these characteristics for comparison:-
- 4Gbit/s FC interface
- 73 - 512GB
- Up to 220MB/sec sustained large block transfers
- Up to 46,000 read IOPS, up to 45,000 IOPS sustained random reads

It also comes with SAS and SATA II interfaces.

The Altima 3.5-inch FC SSD appears to have some performance superiorities over the Zeus IOPS.

When news of this Altima FC interface SSD came my way I asked BiTMICRO this: "I'm puzzled as to why STEC seems to be making all the running concerning the use of Fibre Channel interface SSDs, with its well-known EMC wins and other enterprise storage and server design wins coming. STEC reckons it has a 12-month advantage on any other SSD supplier in this market. Could BiTMICRO help me understand the market positioning of STEC SSDs and BiTMICRO SSDs please? Also could BiTMICRO update me with its OEM (or other) customers in the storage drive array space?"

Here's the official reply from BiTMICRO's VP for Marketing, Lyndon Santos: "They (STEC) do have an advantage since they were first to get design-wins on major storage OEMs (particularly EMC with their 1GFC and now 2GFC FC Zeus IOPS drive). Although BiTMICRO is first to market with its 1GFC SSD in late 2002 (now in its obsolescence stage), most of the major storage OEMs chose to wait for our next generation 4GFC E-Disk Altima SSD. We expect its FCS to Tier 1 storage OEMs in October this year."

"We believe STEC and BiTMICRO are at the least both going after the enterprise market segment in the short term, that is SSDs to complement HDDs in midrange and enterprise class disk arrays for Tier 0 applications, and also as performance accelerators in servers, bladed servers and storage as DAS (direct-attached storage) for logfile and cached file systems applications. We also believe that STEC's estimate of a 12 month lead is based on the amount of time that it took EMC (at the least) to qualify the Zeus IOPS FC drive. We expect that succeeding qualification times for new SSDs will come faster."

Well now, isn't that interesting. STEC will have competition in the enterprise storage array space in two months as BiTMICRO will have a tier 1 storage OEM receiving its SSDs in October. Who could that be?

Possible candidates are: EMC (second source possibility), HDS (although it is thought to have committed to STEC), HP (for EVA since the XP is a resold HDS USP), IBM (DS8000 possibility), Dell (for its PS Series as it resells EMC CLARiiON and the CX4 is getting SSDs c/o STEC we think), NetApp (no known commit to SSDs at all yet), and Sun (which resells HDS and has committed to server use of SSDs).

Watch this space.

^{[Chris Mellor.]}