Flash Memory Summit: From Toshiba’s Comeback to Flash Cache and Consistent Performance
This week’s Flash Memory Summit expo featured a lot of new products, both from industry veterans and less known vendor that are trying to make a name for themselves.
Toshiba, the inventor of NAND flash – memory that can retain data even when it’s not powered – celebrated the 25th anniversary of the technology with the debut of the PX-Series, a new line of SSDs designed to enable some of the more widely-seen flash use studies in the enterprise.
The PX03AN is the company’s entry level drive, designed to accommodate some of the more resource intensive processes in this range such as boot storms. It is available with either 55, 120, 240 or 480GB of capacities in a 7mm 2.5-inch form-factor.
The PX02AM mid-range device focuses more on reliability, comes in capacities of 100, 200 and 400GB, and is meant to power high-tier server applications that use up more resources.
The most expensive SSD is the PX02SM, which comes in capacities of 200, 400, 800GB1 and 1.6TB2. It’s the first enterprise flash product by Toshiba to use eMLC NAND and is supposed to be used primarily for high performance computing/
Another highlight of the gathering was the Best of Show contest. A company called Proximal Data snagged the award for a flash caching solution that runs in virtualized environment and automatically puts hot data in on SSDs. Flash caching technology has laso been developed by Fusion-io, and is something Wikbion’s Dave Floyer predicted in a report published after last year’s Flash Memory Summit.
Floyer also pointed at consistent performance as an advancement vendors are going to have to tackle. And Virident did exactly that. This year its FlashMAX II PCIe card made an appearance at the event, a chip with 2.2 TB of capacity and performance of 1.5 million IOs per sec. The best part: the company says that thanks to MLC and clever design, the FlashMAX can run at full speed for years.
Flash is big right now, there’s no denying that. Even the big vendors are showing interest, especially now after IBM acquired one of the biggest players in this market.
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