Diablo Technologies steaming towards widely adopted DDR4 Memory Channel Storage

by Leave a Comment

diablo_technologies (1)Diablo Technologies, Riccardo Badalone on DDR4 plans
Date: 14 February 2014
Diablo Technologies Crunchbase Profile

I spoke with Riccardo Badalone yesterday, who updated me on the current state of affairs at Diablo.

Last time we spoke in September of last year, the interview was covered in a 2 part article, you can find part 1 here, and part 2 here. In that interview, Riccardo hinted towards a few great partnerships and customers coming up. In the period in between, the following has happened:

  • Partnership with Smart Storage Systems
  • SanDisk acquired Smart Storage and market Diablo Technologies MCS as SanDisk ULLtraDIMM
  • IBM adopts Diablo MCS / SanDisk ULLtraDIMM as eXFLash in their portfolio
  • Diablo Technologies keeps building out their partnerships and achieved ‘VMware Ready’ Status this week

    • That’s quite some progress in barely 6 months time. There has also been some negative publicity concerning a lawsuit that Netlist filed against Diablo.

    I caught up with Riccardo to discuss all of the above and hear about their plans for the upcoming year, particularly where new partnerships / customers and DDR4 are concerned.

    The partnership with IBM is great news. Are you committed to an exclusive partnership with them?

    Riccardo Badalone 1IBM was the first to really recognise the value of what we were doing. They have very big plans for the technology and they made MCS a key piece of their X6 platform which is an awesome platform. They’re very important to us, we see them as a very valuable customer and integrator partner. That said, we have no exclusivity with them.
    [Read more…]

    Diablo Technologies VMware ready

    by Leave a Comment

    Diablo Technologies VMwareDiablo Technologies update: VMware ready status
    Date: 11 February 2014
    Diablo Technologies Crunchbase Profile

    Diablo Technologies VMware ready

    Diablo is doing great. They partnered up with Smart Storage Systems, which was then acquired by Sandisk that sells Diablo Memory channel Storage (MCS) as Sandisk UltraDIMM and TeraDIMM. IBM is now using UltraDIMM in their x-series servers where it is called eXFlash

    The news today; Diablo Technologies VMware ready status is announced today. VMware’s ‘check’ will certainly help market adoption and is another sign this innovative technology is here to stay. I congratulate Diablo with this achievement!

    This article is followed up by this interview with CEO Riccardo Badalone

    Background and links

    Diablo website
    14 February 2014 Interview with Riccardo Badalone on DDR4 plans
    10 September 2013 Diablo Technologies MCS background and specs
    9 September 2013 Interview with CEO Riccardo Badalone
    30 augustus 2013 Introduction to Diablo Technologies MCS

    Interview with John Blumenthal, CEO of CloudPhysics

    by Leave a Comment

    CloudPhysics LogoCloudPhysics, interview with CEO John Blumenthal
    Date: 30 September 2013
    CloudPhysics CrunchBase profile

    Introduction to CloudPhysics

    A company’s IT Infrastructure is crucial to its survival and succes, which is why most companies invest heavily in their IT Infrastructure to reduce risk and increase performance.

    Despite these investments, the complex and dynamic nature of IT Infrastructure environments means that most companies do not have a complete picture of their IT infrastructure and the workloads that run on it. There is a risk and performance penalty associated with this.

    The risk lies in making changes to your largely unknown environment; like adding resources, adding workloads and changing policies. These can have unpredictable effects that jeopardize the stability of your IT Infrastructure. To mitigate this risk, companies create separate Test & Development infrastructures to test new configurations. However these are costly and time-consuming, plus some real-world scenarios cannot easily be replicated.

    The performance penalty arises from the fact that an unknown IT Infrastructure can not use its resources optimally.

    Screen Shot 2013-12-30 at 13.42.08

    Enter CloudPhysics. They have developed a non-disruptive data collection technique for VMware vSphere environments where data about the IT Infrastructure and the workloads that run on it are collected.
    [Read more…]

    Interview with Moshe Bar – VC Partner at Atlantic Capital

    by Leave a Comment

    Atlantic Capital PartnersAtlantic Capital Partners, interview with Moshe Bar
    Date: 9 December 2013
    Atlantic Capital Partners CrunchBase profile

    Moshe Bar of Atlantic Capital Partners

    Atlantic Capital Partners (ACP) is founded in 2010 and invests in the growth stage of start-ups in (enterprise) software and digital life domains. Currently ACP has three general partners, Fred van den Bosch, Dr. Marcus Engelbert and Moshe Bar and two venture partners; Raffaele Jerusalmi and Lars Dittrich.

    Moshe Bar is a well known figure in the IT landscape. The list of companies he co-founded is substantial; Qlusters, XenSource, Hyper9, Qumranet, are the prominent ones. Moshe is now partner at Atlantic Capital Partners and serves on several boards.

    I know Moshe through his time at Qumranet and decided to contact him for an interview, to find out more about Atlantic Capital Partners and his current investment focus.
    [Read more…]

    Interview with Arun Agarwal, CEO of Infinio

    by Leave a Comment

    infinio_logo2Infinio, interview with CEO Arun Agarwal
    Date: 23 November 2013
    Infinio CrunchBase profile

    Infinio
    Centralized storage often represents the performance bottleneck of the datacentre stack. The storage array sits far away from the application and has to deal with changing I/O from multiple applications. As a result, latency to a busy storage array is high and performance can be unpredictable.

    Moving storage closer to the application is a great way to solve the problem. Server side flash is close to the application and can act as a buffer to steady reads and writes to the centralized storage array.

    A barrier to overcome with most solutions, is that customers are required to order hardware and invest in considerable work to perform the installation.

    Recognizing these barriers, Infinio differentiates itself by offering a virtual appliance that uses existing server memory to cache reads. To sidestep any remaining organizational barriers, the product can be downloaded and fully tested for 30 days.

    I Interviewed Arun Agarwal, CEO of Infinio to find out more about the company and the product.
    [Read more…]

    Interview with Steve Goodman – Partner at Toba Capital

    by 1 Comment

    Toba CapitalToba Capital, interview with Steve Goodman
    Date: 18 November 2013
    Toba Capital CrunchBase profile

    Toba Capital

    Toba Capital is a Vinny Smith company, differentiating itself by being heavily involved operationally in the companies they invest in. Partners at Toba Capital have CEO positions at one of the portfolio companies of Toba Capital, while vetting deals on other portfolio companies at the same time.

    Their model makes sure that Toba is committed to the companies they invest in, and makes sure that the VC partners have hands-on operational know-how.

    According to Walter Angererer: ‘One of the things we bring to the table is operational experience, instead of just flying in a few times a year to review the data. So each of the partners are dividing our time between managing our companies which is our primary task, and managing our portfolio companies’. That means that at Toba Capital, the partners limit themselves to 3 to 5 companies they are managing at the same time.

    I interviewed Steve Goodman of Toba Capital to find out more about Toba’s investment model.
    [Read more…]

    Interview with Yoram Novick, CEO of Maxta

    by Leave a Comment

    MAXTA INC. LOGOMaxta, interview continued with CEO Yoram Novick
    Date: 18 November 2013
    Maxta CrunchBase profile

    CEO Series

    As a part of a larger series, I am interviewing CEOs that lead companies in the field of Storage, Virtualization and Networking. What developments in the market did they see that inspired them to build their company? How will the market develop from here? These questions are on most of our minds, and I am keen on asking leaders in the industry for their views.

    In this article, I interview Yoram Novick, the CEO of Maxta Storage.

    Maxta

    A short introduction to Maxta based on my introductory article of last week.

    Maxta offers a software storage solution, that creates a storage layer across server side flash + magnetic storage. The solution works by installing their software on each of the servers you want to include and Maxta creates a storage pool across them.

    Read my interview with the CTO of Atlantis Computing, another player in the Software Defined Storage space

    Magnetic disks are leveraged for capacity and flash is used as a caching layer, with the capability of accelerating both reads and writes. For speed and redundancy, the software replicates writes between the server flash of different hosts, and de-stages to magnetic disks later.

    I interviewed Yoram Novick to learn more about Maxta and his views on the storage market
    [Read more…]

    Interview with Yaron Valler – Hasso Plattner Ventures

    by Leave a Comment

    Hasso Plattner VenturesHasso Plattner Ventures, interview with Yaron Valler
    Date: 18 November 2013
    Hasso Plattner Ventures CrunchBase profile

    Hasso Plattner Ventures

    Hasso Plattner Ventures (HPV) currently manages 2 funds worth a total of 150m Euro. A third fund of 120m Euro is coming available later this year.

    One of the main investors in HPV is Prof. Plattner, one of the co-founders of SAP. HPV invests wordwide, mainly in early stage deep-tech software and hardware companies, from applications to bare-metal.

    Yaron Valler is Managing Partner at Hasso Plattner and investor in Diablo Technologies. We met a few months ago in Berlin, together with CEO of Diablo Technologies Riccardo Badalone.
    [Read more…]

    Introduction to Maxta Storage

    by

    MAXTA INC. LOGOMaxta, introduction by Yoram Novick
    Date: 12 November 2013
    Maxta CrunchBase profile

    This article is followed up by an interview with the CEO of Maxta, Yoram Novick. Read the article here.

    Maxta is a new player in the software defined storage space that caught my attention. Their solution creates a storage layer across server side flash + magnetic storage. The product is downloadable, 100% software only.

    I received a whitepaper from them yesterday on which most of this article is based. Consider this a primer, later this week I will interview the CEO of Maxta, Yoram Novick.
    [Read more…]

    Interview with Walter Angerer, CEO of Parsec Labs

    by Leave a Comment

    Parsec logo wideParsec Labs, interview with Walter Angerer
    Date: 6 November 2013
    Parsec Labs website

    CEO Series

    As a part of a larger series, I am interviewing CEOs that lead companies in the field of Storage, Virtualization and Networking. What developments in the market did they see that inspired them to build their company? How will the market develop from here? These questions are on most of our minds, and I am keen on asking leaders in the industry for their views.

    Parsec Labs

    Innovation in the NAS market has focused on performance acceleration through usage of SSD technology. For an SMB customer, migrating to a larger and faster NAS represents a large capital investment and migrating data from the old to the new NAS is a painful process.

    Parsec Labs targets the SMB market with a Storage router that sits between your NAS systems and your clients. The storage router accelerates performance with its SSD layer and adds de-duplication and compression technology to leverage your existing NAS storage capacity.
    [Read more…]