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Storage: More Dollars for more Startups
Back in April we reported how venture capital money had pretty much dried up in 2009, but in 2010 interest in some select areas, like big data and storage, has really started to boom. Data is at the center of a hot trend with people needing to store ever more data and to have speedy access to it.
The trend continued this past week as a couple of new startups are launching some innovative storage technologies, one targeting the low end of the storage market, and the other targeting the very high end of the market: Anobit and Kaminario.
On the low-end side, Israel-based Anobit announced a low-cost MultiLevel Cell (MLC) Flash-based solid-state (SSD) drive. SSD is memory used for tablets, netbooks, notebooks through to desktops. Anobit’s technology adds greater reliability to MultiLevel cells, a technology that’s not new but which hasn’t been as popular as the standars SingleLevel SSD cells because the reliability has not been as good. By changing the Memory Signal Processing, Anobit is able to produce MLC-based SSDs with endurance cycle ratings equal to those of SLC-based SSDs. MLC-based SSDs currently cost about $1.58 per GB of capacity, compared to $6.75 per GB for SLC-based SSDs. Anobit MLC SSD will come in at around the same price point as existing MLCs but with the reliability of the SLC.
On the high end of the market, another startup called Kaminario launched today with its K2 storage system. The K2 system revs up the number of storage operations that can be done. IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second) is a common benchmark for hard disks, solid state drives, and other computer storage devices. The entry-level Kaminario system handles 300,000 IOPS and a high-end version delivers 1.5 million IOPS, or 16GBps throughput. Kaminario is able to obtain that very high speed by using DRAM — currently the most expensive type of storage. But it is expensive. The 1 Terabyte entry-level system costs $200,000.
It’ll be interesting to see what new sorts of applications spring up as a result of large-capacity super-speedy storage. Applications may begin to stop relying on hard drives for persisting their data, keeping all data available and resident on high-capacity high-speed storage media.
