Back at the Flash Memory Summit in August, we had the opportunity to see a mock up of a Toshiba hybrid HDD/SSD solution. Whether or not the drive would go into production was unclear at the time, but the Japanese company announced today that it intends to go forward with the design. Toshiba, which makes NAND flash, SSDs, and conventional …

This year at FMS 2012, we were met one day by LSI representatives who politely handed us a non-nondescript cardboard box and simply said, “Enjoy”. We had been waiting for this box for some time and new it to be the LSI Nytro MegaRAID NMR 8120-4i Application Acceleration Card, part of the trinity of new LSI application accelerating products, all …

 SuperMicro has achieved up to million IOPS in their SYS-6047R-TXRF servers using STEC’s PCIe SSDs (or SSAs as STEC refers to them, for Solid State Accelerators). These servers are based on the Intel Xeon E5-2600 family of CPUs (Socket 2011) and support up to 512GB of RAM. STEC’s current PCIe offerings are based on their own silicon, and come in PCIe Gen2 …

LSI’s new Nytro MegaRAID Acceleration Cards have been anticipated for some time and are now available to LSI channel partners. It’s certainly one of the more intriguing products on the market as it manages to combine LSI’s Raid-On-Chip technology, software, and flash controllers courtesy of LSI SandForce. From top to bottom, its one of those products that would be hard …

Integrated Device Technology (IDT) did well this week at Flash Memory Summit, demonstrating their 16 channel NVMe 1.0 standard PCIe SSD controller. The first publicly seen device of it’s type, the IDT controller is on the leading edge of the new NVMe standard. IDT is interested in selling their controllers to third parties rather than selling their own SSDs, but to …

With all of the new technologies and products being shown in Santa Clara at FMS 2012, there were some products you might not have heard about. A personal favorite of mine wasn’t a fancy new enterprise product or hip new data center solution. Instead, it’s a machine that does something fairly pedestrian — it merely puts labels on SSDs. Able …

Marvell already has a hand in just about everything. The silicon company makes practically everything, including some of the most popular SSD controllers around. We had a chance to get our eyes on another Marvell product, the DragonFly. The DragonFly platform should ship in a few slightly different flavors, but the one we saw was based around the idea of …

If you happened to be at the Flash Memory Summit, you might have caught Kent Smith, the LSI SandForce Senior Marketing Director, delivering presentation on the virtues of over-provisioning. Over-provisioning is the process of setting aside additional capacity to help with SSD performance and longevity, and Kent’s message is don’t be afraid to take advantage of it.  Let’s take a look …

Toshiba is adding some new enterprise SSDS to the mix. Slotting in below their high end SAS MK4001GRZB, the new siblings are armed with lower cost eMLC Toggle. Holding down the high-performance end, the PX02SM SSD uses Toshibas 24nm eMLC Toggle NAND together with a dual-port 12Gbps SAS interface. Capacities of 200GB to 1600GB have been promised, though 12 gig …

Marvells new ARM-based microserver is a look at one possible future “ a super-scalable series of low-powered ARM processors harmoniously mated with flash. Leveraging several Marvell properties, including a series of quad-core ARM processors, the new tiny approach to servers could become a big thing in the future. Making all this possible is the Marvell Armada XP SoC. Geared toward …