Storage news ticker – February 14

SSD controller firmware developer Burlywood has produced a white paper: “Why Your Concerns About Data Center SSDs are Justified.” It claims: “The Burlywood [FlashOS software] consistently delivers higher ongoing performance, lower latency without spikes, and better reliability with longer lifespans.” Read the paper here.

We have received a presentation used by Folio Photonics founder and chief innovation officer Kenneth Singer, entitled “High capacity optical data storage for active archives.” It discusses Folio Photonics multilayer extruded recording medium technology and presents TCO calculations between it and cloud storage.

Folio Photonics media TCO slide.

Download the 17-slide deck here.

Intel has discontinued the Optane SSD P4800X product. This was first launchd in 2017.

Tim Pitcher.

Nebulon’s VP for worldwide sales Tim Pitcher has resigned from that role to join business consultancy Calligo as its chief revenue officer. He’s listed as an executive advisor for Nebulon as well as being CRO full time at Calligo on LinkedIn. Also, Nick Thurlow, Nebulon’s EMEA director for OEM and partner sales has unfortunately passed away.

ResearchGate has published a PDF about “Datacenter Ethernet and RDMA: Issues at Hyperscale.” The authors “revisit RoCE’s design points and conclude that several of its shortcomings must be addressed to fulfill the demands of hyperscale datacenters. We predict that both the datacenter and high-performance computing markets will converge and adopt modernized Ethernet-based high-performance networking solutions that will replace TCP and RoCE within a decade.”

SSD supplier Samsung has issued a firmware fix for the 990 Pro accelerated heath decline issue. Robbie Khan describes it in a Neowin post. Khan says “according to reports from owners who have installed the firmware, they seem to indicate that whilst the firmware does seem to stop the degrade continuing, it does not reverse the health percentage back to what it should be based on the total data written to the drive.” The update can be downloaded in Samsung Magician or here. Khan concludes “This whole saga has personally left me with not much desire to buy another Samsung SSD, especially after my first RMA experience with Samsung Memory.”

Silk, the Kaminario all-flash array successor company,  announced Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) grew over 50 percent in FY2022. This comes on top of the company securing $56 million in Series B funding earlier in the year. Silk accelerates databases running in Azure by using ephemeral storage instances. Dani Golan, founder and CEO at Silk, said: “Increasingly, customers are looking for more reliable ways to migrate and run their business-critical workloads in the public cloud. In 2022, an increasing number of companies turned to Silk to overcome their two biggest constraints on cloud adoption: performance and cost.” Silk has demonstrated up to 16.4GB/sec and 2 million transfers per second from a single Data Pod with consistent sub-millisecond latency.

Davide Villa.

Superfast xiRAID software supplier Xinnor has appointed Davide Villa as its CRO. Villa most recently served as director of business development in the EMEAI region at Western Digital, spending nine years at HGST/WD. In the early days of the flash boom, he managed business development for the NAND flash division at STMicroelectronics and later on, he had multiple roles at sTec, including VP of EMEA sales, when the company introduced the first enterprise SSD to the market.