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HP Moves To Lower The Price Of SSDs
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HP has become the second major player to bring an “affordable all-flash array” to market with new additions to the HP 3PAR StoreServ range.
The new 8000 series consists of a Starter Kit (20800 AFA) and software updates for the full StoreServ range, and HP can now offer multi-petabyte systems offering 3.2 million IOPS with scale out from two to eight controllers and proven tier-1 resiliency.
“Regardless of your size, budget, growth rate, quality of service requirements or even your storage network environment, HP 3PAR StoreServ storage offers a best-in-class flash solution to power your public, private or hybrid cloud with uncompromising adaptability from a single architecture,” said Manish Goel, senior vice president and general manager of HP Storage.
HP has also announced additions to the existing 20000 range, including a 20800 All-Flash Starter Kit clocking in at $99,000, and the 20450, a 6PB all-flash array with 1.8 million IOPS.
Using these products together can create up to 60PB of aggregate usable capacity. Both ranges offer the same hardware acceleration from the HP 3PAR Gen5 Thin Express ASIC, which offers double the bandwidth of competing platforms and up to 20GBps of read bandwidth.
Both ranges are now also certified for use in SAP HANA Tailored Data Centre Integrations. Priority Optimisation can bring latencies as low as 0.5 milliseconds through a QoS engine that requires almost no interaction from system admins.
This is just part of an aggressive strategy in cheap, scalable enterprise storage. In April the company launched the Openstack based StoreVirtual range.
HP has also announced data protection enhancements to the 3PAR StoreServ powered by StoreOnce Recovery Manager Central, offering complete granular recovery of backups taken incrementally based only on changed data to minimise resources.
Finally, Fibre customers can use the new HP SmartSAN, which uses Express Provisioning Technology to orchestrate SAN fabric zoning, reducing the process of SAN configuration by 80 percent.
The products are designed to be a little more robust than SanDisk’s InfiniFlash, which is designed for no more than a few writes of archiving, and the price tag goes up accordingly starting at $19,000, but it’s still a significant drop in price for all-flash and hybrid flash arrays.
An eight-node enterprise flash family with density equivalent to a mechanical drive array starts at $1.50 per gigabyte, based on its predecessor line. That’s a big drop given the speed advantages that could pay for itself in certain sectors.
The products will be rolling out over the next few months starting with the StoreServ 8000 which will be available immediately. More products will be available next month, and RMC-V brings up the rear in October.
Source-http://www.thegurureview.net/computing-category/hp-moves-to-lower-the-price-of-ssds.html
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Memory Chips Appear To Be Dropping
The production value of memory chips in Korea fell by a percent on the previous quarter, affected mainly by a low bit growth of DRAM and NAND flash chips from SK Hynix.
Beancounters at Digitimes Research said that sales totaled US$12 billion in the second quarter of 2015, increasing 1 per cent from the previous quarter,
Server-use DRAM products became the primary product line for SK Hynix for the first time in the second quarter as sales of its PC-use DRAM chips suffered a significant decline compared to a quarter earlier.
Price reductions of PC DRAM chips were greater than market expectations in the second quarter due to an oversupply in the market, affecting sales performance of SK Hynix.
Samsung was less affected by declining PC DRAM prices because mobile DRAM products accounted for 35 per cent of its total DRAM income.
Samsung memory and semiconductor revenues hit a record high in the second quarter.
For the third quarter, the bit growth rates of NAND flash shipments at Samsung will rise 10 per cent and SK Hynix will increase 13 per cent on quarter.
SK Hynix will manage a five to eight per cent growth while Samsung is expected to see shipments of its DRAM chips grow 12-14 per cent.
Digitimes Researcher flipped their iChing coins and came to the conclusion that Korea’s memory products are expected to increase 3 per cent on quarter and 12 per cent on year in the third quarter of 2015.
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Are Flash Drives Becoming More Secure?
Flash drives in mobile devices are set to become faster and secure thanks to a new standard signed off by the JEDEC Solid State Technology Association.
eMMC version 5.1, will allow for a new mobile storage that will provide faster access. Flash drives based on eMMC 5.1 can handle 4K streaming and more data-intensive tasks.
Samsung has started making 64GB, 32GB and 16GB drives based on the new standard and is shipping units to customers, but has not said whether those drives will be used in the Galaxy S6 smartphone, which will be announced early next month at the Mobile World Congress trade show.
Samsung’s 64GB eMMC 5.1 has a random read performance of 11,000 IOPS (input/output operations per second) and write performance of 13,000 IOPS, compared to a rough performance of 7,000 IOPS for 64GB drives based on the previous eMMC 5.0 standard.
The speed improvements comes through some cache and data-streaming improvements.
There is also something called Secure Write Protection ensures only specific entities are able to access files and lock or unlock storage.
Is The Demand For DRAM Slowing?
Hynix has reported a slowing down of growth in the memory chip profits as it posted its first drop in quarterly profit in two years, casting doubt on medium-term revenue growth.
SK Hynix President Kim Joon-ho told analysts that the problem was a change in product mix and a transition to more complex production technology will crimp third-quarter shipments growth for the key DRAM business. Analysts are concerned that DRAM shipments growth will be increasingly limited in the latter half of the year, given the technology migration issues, which would lead to slower top-line growth. But Hong said such concerns were overblown, as limited shipments growth would help keep supply tight and support chip prices.
Hynix posted an operating profit of $1.07 billion for the April-June period which is not to be sneezed at. But that result was 2.7 percent below the same quarter a year earlier. The other problem is the rise in the value of the won, which toll on revenue, which fell 0.2 percent compared with the previous corresponding period. The currency on average gained more than 9 percent against the dollar during the April-June quarter from a year ago.
President Kim said growth in shipments of DRAM chips, mainly used in personal computers and servers, would slow to a mid-single-digit percent rate in the third quarter, from 13 percent in the April-June period. Shipments of NAND chips, typically used in mobile devices, would slow to a high 20 percent rate from 54 percent.
He said that DRAM market trends will remain favorable due to better-than-expected demand for personal computers as well as data centre-related server demand.
“The launch of new mobile products by major companies and the development of LTE-related demand in China will likely keep demand-side conditions firm,” he added.
Analysts played down concerns of a supply glut arising from the company’s plans for capital investment in the second half of 2015, and expected short-term earnings to remain firm.
Can Anyone Challenge Samsung’s SSDs?
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You have seen that many companies that were selling SSD drives are slowly moving away from retail and etail consumer sales. Patriot and OCZ are among them and one of the key reasons is that Samsung has insanely attractive prices that are hard to fight.
Currently Samsung’s SSD 840 EVO series 250GB sells for about $2000, while Amazon in the US is selling the same drive for $177.99. The 120GB version in EU sells for €89.90 while US shops sell it for $99.99. Samsung offers a 500 GB SSD for $339.99 and at Newegg Mushkin, OCZ and similar priced or slightly cheaper but for 480GB drives. Toshiba Q series are the cheapest in this category with $319.99.
These are not the fastest or the cheapest drives on the market, but they are some of the most affordable per gigabyte and they offer quite good performance. In addition, consumers simply trust the Samsung brand and many of them are buying Samsung drives thanks to brand recognition, putting a lot of pressure on the smaller players. Just as it happened with the RAM memory market, profit margins on SSD drives went so low that you need to sell huge quantities to support your business model.
This is simply not a viable option for smaller players.
Samsung has its own chip production, has its own notebooks to put your drives in and it apparently is doing well in the market. Event close competitors are confirming that Samsung puts a lot of price pressure on everyone else. It sort of helps if you have your own NAND chip fabs.
Can DRAM Be Saved By Win8?
Microsoft’s roll-out of Windows 8 is not expected to generate a significant increase in DRAM shipments, according to market research firm IHS iSuppli.
Other operating system roll outs have pushed up the demand for DRAM, and some had hoped that it would save the battered industry. However while iSuppli thinks that Global DRAM bit shipments are expected to increase by eight percent in the fourth quarter compared to the third quarter, this is much lower than previous Windows roll outs.
In the good old days Windows rollouts have always generated double-digit increases in quarterly DRAM shipments. Part of the problem is that Windows 8 is pretty good software and has a leaner hardware requirement. But the biggest part is that Windows 8 is not likely to deliver a significant increase in PC shipments in the fourth quarter compared to the fourth quarter of 2011, IHS said.
Clifford Leimbach, analyst for memory demand forecasting at IHS said that starting with Windows 7 and continuing with Windows 8, Microsoft has taken a leaner approach with its operating systems, maintaining the same DRAM requirements as before.
NAND SSD Prices Slowly Falling
Prices for NAND SSDs have started to fall and the industry thinks that OEM contract rates are expected to cost less than a dollar per GB by beginning of April.
Thanks to HDD prices still more than double the rates prior to Thailand floods, the gap between mainstream SSD drives and traditional hard drives has narrowed. SSD is about five times as expensive as HDD but sales are now so high because more enthusiasts are buying SSD drives that the prices are expected to fall further.
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Apple Helps Samsung Sell Tablets
December 20, 2011 by admin
Filed under Consumer Electronics
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Samsung has thanked Apple for the free advertising for its Galaxy Tab created by the legal disputes between the companies.
Tyler McGee, VP of telecommunications at Samsung Australia, said that Apple had made Samsung’s tablet computer “a household name”, which the firm believes is more than it could have managed with its marketing alone, according to the Sydney Morning Herald.
This ironic twist of fate means that instead of slowing Samsung down and keeping its products off the market, Apple has inadvertently created a lot of buzz for those devices, which is now paying off with high demand as the Galaxy Tab returns to shop shelves in Australia.
Samsung has shipped a significant volume of tablets to Australia in time for the 16 December launch, perfect timing for the busy Christmas shopping period. However, McGee warned that demand is higher than supply, suggesting that there will be shortages of the device.
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