Themis Founder, Bill
Kehret, Joins VITA's Board
FREMONT,
California - April 3, 2008 - Themis Computer announced today that the
company has joined the VITA organization's board of directors.
William
E. Kehret, president and CEO of Themis Computer was appointed to the VITA board
of directors effective March 1, 2008. William "Bill" Kehret will fill
a position in VITA's expanded board membership. The appointment of Bill Kehret
reflects the organization's desire to strengthen its executive ranks and Bill's
vision will help VITA to continue its leadership role in the embedded computing
market.
As founder and CEO of Themis Computer, Bill Kehret brings a strong
technological background to the VITA board. Bill Kehret is also a member of
Themis' board of directors. Prior to founding Themis in 1989, he spent over 20
years in the embedded computing market, most of it managing the several
companies he helped found.
...Themis
Computer profile, Storage
Industry Trade Associations,
Storage People
Editor's
comments:- as someone who integrated over 100 different types of VME cards
in the late 1980s I never thought that VME would last so long. I didn't think
that SBus would be successful at first either. But within a few years of Sun
launching its SBus
in 1989 - it became a bigger market in revenue than VME.
VME always
supported multiple CPU architectures and operating systems, and it evolved and
has survived to the present day. SBus was never adopted outside the SPARC
market and Sun
transitioned SBus in 1997 in favor of PCI which first made its appearance
in a SPARC system in the SPARCengine Ultra AX.
SPARC Product Directory
featured VMEbus SPARC SBCs from over 10 oems in SPARC's history. These
were:- Auspex Systems, DTK Computer, Force Computers, General Micro Systems,
Integrated Micro Products, Ironics, Men Mikro Electronik, Solflower, Solbourne
, Sun Microsystems and
Themis Computer,
the last of which is the only company to have stayed the VME SPARC SBC course.
SSDs are as hot a subject
today as SPARC was in the blazing years of the dotcom boom. 7 companies make
VMEbus form factor SSDs. I added a new entry for another VME SSD in our
SSD Buyers Guide
only a few days ago.
On the subject of
SSDs and things that have
been around a long time - Texas
Memory Systems celebrated 30 years making SSDs this week.
Unveiling XLC Flash SSD Technology
Editor:- March 31, 2008 -
STORAGEsearch.com today published an article about stealth mode fabless
semiconductor company, XLC Disk, Inc called - Unveiling XLC Flash SSD
Technology.
It describes their revolutionary multi-level cell nand
flash technology which may appear in a new range of high density
flash SSDs in Q1
2009.
Overcoming the intrinsic technology problems which have limited
previous MLC
devices to 2 bits in a single
flash memory cell - the
new XLC technology uses a patent pending calibration / discriminator
architecture which enables reliable operation with 4 bits (with today's process
technology) and may be scalable to more bits in the future.
If
successful - this type of technology could deliver 16x the storage density
currently available from SLC SSDs using the same area of silicon - thereby
closing the gap in cost per gigabyte between
SSDs and
HDDs. As with any new
storage technology reliability
is an unknown factor - but XLC Disk claim that intrinsic data repeatability
(before on chip error correction) is at least as good as current MLC devices.
This article was initially planned for publication tomorrow (on April
1st) but when I contacted Jim Handy at
Objective
Analysis for a comment on this spoof concept - he surprised me by saying
that he knows of at least one of the
top 10 SSD companies
which is working on exactly this type of technology. It shows that fact can be
stranger than fiction - and we can expect to see SSDs starting to put price
pressue on the hard drive market years earlier than predicted by Moore's Law
type density improvements. ...read the article
WEDC Targets Medical CompactFlash Market
Phoenix, AZ - December 19,
2007 - White Electronic Designs Corp is leveraging its defense industry
experience and expertise to develop high-reliability modules for the growing
portable medical device market.
According to the U.S. Census
Bureau, there will be an expected 40 million persons in the U.S. over the age of
65 by 2010, driving the need for portable medical devices, especially for home
use. The portable medical device market is driven by the same requirements
and expectations as the defense segment; such as high quality and reliability,
shorter development cycles, a well-defined and documented supply chain and
extended product lifecycles. Among other products WEDC designs and
manufactures one of the industry's first medical series CompactFlash cards.
...White Electronic
Designs profile
Editor's comments:- WEDC has also recently
published a paper
Is All
CompactFlash Really Created Equal? (pdf) which uses the medical
instrumentation market as the backdrop for a discussion about
flash SSDs similar
to those concerns analyzed in
SSD Myths and
Legends - "write endurance" - which looked at the enterprise
server market.
LEON3 Processor Licensed for New Space Missions
Goteborg
Sweden - September 12, 2007 - Gaisler Research AB announced that
license agreements have been signed for the use of the fault tolerant LEON3
processor with Assurance Technology Corp (US), Syderal SA (Switzerland)
and Tubitak Uzay (Turkey).
The LEON3 and the GRLIB IP
library will be used together with the RTAX2000S FPGA from ACTEL Inc.
"These license agreements represent yet another confirmation of
the success of the fault tolerant LEON3 processor. The LEON3 processor has now
been accepted for critical space missions in Europe, US and Asia," said Per
Danielsson, president & CEO of Gaisler Research.
The fault tolerant
LEON3
processor is based on the standard LEON3 SPARC V8 Processor. It has been
designed for operation in the harsh space environment, and includes
functionality to detect and correct errors in all on-chip RAM memories.
NextComputing Ships 1.6GHz SPARC Portable
NASHUA, N.H. -
February 7, 2007 - NextComputing integrates the 1.33GHz and 1.60GHz
UltraSPARCIIIi processors in its Vigor ULTRA-III rugged deployable server line,
committing to Sun Microsystems' server-processing architecture beyond 2010.
Encased in a compact, rugged chassis with flip-down keyboard
protecting the integrated (1600 x 1200) LCD, the Vigor ULTRA-III is currently
used to support critical C4 field deployments, as well as a stand-alone, "small-footprint"
server in command and control and training simulation centers worldwide. The
modular, open-standards architecture of the Vigor ULTRA-III results in the
superior flexibility, scalability, and extended lifecycle viability compared to
static "point-solution" designs like the
Bullfrog
laptop, whose parent company has not addressed future support strategies or new
mobile SPARC product announcements since 2005.
"NextCom remains
committed to the worldwide Solaris user base. Solaris 8 is supported, as well as
Trusted Solaris, Solaris 9, and Solaris 10," says Bob Labadini, NextCom CTO
and founder. "We offer the most comprehensive support and enable our
clients to port proprietary applications from Solaris 8 to Solaris 10 within the
same platform, while also providing a migration path to Solaris 10 X86,
Enterprise Linux, and Windows 2003 Server with our Vigor Opteron, featuring a
common platform package, and the same look and feel as our Vigor ULTRA-III."
...NextCom
profile, SPARC
Notebooks |
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| Squeak!
- SSD Myths and Legends - "write endurance" |
| Does the
fatal gene of "write endurance" built into
flash
solid state
disks prevent their deployment in intensive server acceleration
applications - such as RAID
systems? |
It was
certainly true as little as a few years ago.
What's the risk with
today's devices?
This article looks at the current generation of
products and calculates how much (or how little) you should be worried. |
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| RAM based SSDs have been
used alongside RAID for years - but flash SSDs are physically smaller and have
bigger capacity (160G in 2.5") and are lower cost than RAM-SSDs and could
actually be configured in standard RAID boxes. F-SSDs aren't as fast as RAM
based products but a single flash SSD can deliver 20,000 IOPs - which when
scaled up in an array - starts to look interesting. ...read the article,
storage reliability
solid state disks | |
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