DataGravity: Game changing data-aware storage

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DataGravity
Interview with founder and CEO Paula Long
Date: 6 October 2014
DataGravity Profile

Paula Long founded EqualLogic, which was acquired by Dell in 2007. She was only interested to get back in business with a truly game changing idea, which she did: Data-aware storage.

paula_long640x474DataGravity won the ‘best of show’ award at VMworld 2014 in the category new technology, definitely a good start. I had the pleasure to speak with Paula Long last week and learn about DataGravity’s plans and current status.
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Chetan Venkatesh: Founder and CTO of Atlantis Computing

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atlantis computing centered2Interview with founder and CTO Chetan Venktatesh
Date: 20 August 2014
Atlantis Crunchbase Profile

In succession to the interview with CEO Bernard Harguindeguy I had the pleasure to speak with the CTO of Atlantis, Chetan Venkatesh.

As the founder of Atlantis, he provided great background to Atlantis. Enjoy the interview!

Willem ter Harmsel: Can you run me through the genesis of Atlantis Computing?

Chetan Venkatesh: Chetan VenkateshI can! I’ve been an entrepreneur most of my life and started Atlantis in 2006. I spent a lot of time in the datacenter, storage and Infrastructure space. I was keen to to explore the software that was on the server side to do something intelligent with storage.

We had Moore’s law deliver twice the horsepower at half the cost. I was inspired to create a storage model that took advantage of these increasing CPU cycles and RAM on the server side.

I wanted to bring data services like de-duplication and compression, that require a lot of CPU power, right next to the application.

(Smiling) It turns out that this is much harder idea to implement in practice than said. It took us almost 3 years to complete the first version of the product and we launched in 2009.
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Rohit Khetrapal, CEO of Tegile Systems on path toward IPO

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tegileTegile Systems, interview with CEO Rohit Khetrapal
Date: 26 February 2014
CrunchBase profile Tegile Systems

As a part of my CEO series, I interview CEOs of innovative companies in the fields of Storage, Virtualization and Networking.

Tegile Systems has been founded in 2009 and offers a range of Hybrid Storage arrays, labelled as Zebi storage arrays. Their top model can be configured as a 100% all-flash array, while keeping the option open to expand the storage capacity with cabinets of magnetic disk up to 200 TB.

Tegile Zebi arrays further offer flexibility in terms of access (iSCSI and Fibrechannel) and work with NFS, CIF and SMB.

I spoke with CEO Rohit Khetrapal about the core values of Tegile Systems, his views on the storage market and their path toward IPO.
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Diablo Technologies steaming towards widely adopted DDR4 Memory Channel Storage

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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.
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    Diablo Technologies VMware ready

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    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 Arun Agarwal, CEO of Infinio

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    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.
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    Interview with Yoram Novick, CEO of Maxta

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    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
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    Interview Poojan Kumar – CEO of PernixData

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    pernixdataPernixData, interview with CEO Poojan Kumar
    Date: 4 November 2013
    PernixData 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.

    PernixData

    Storage arrays have typically been designed for Data Services and not performance. By scaling up disks inside the array, performance does increase but the supporting infrastructure quickly becomes a bottleneck.

    Server side flash offers a solution by being close to the application. However because it is a single device, you loose many of the crucial advantages of virtualization like mobility (HA & DRS)
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    Interview with CEO of Jeda Networks | Stuart Berman

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    jedanetworksJeda Networks, interview with Stuart Berman
    Date: 5 Oktober 2013
    Jeda Networks CrunchBase profile

    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. This article is followed up by part 2 with background on Software Defined Storage Networking (SDSN)

    Jeda Networks created a Software Defined Storage Network solution that reduces complexity in the connectivity between the compute layer and storage layer. They abstract al the complexity into software and then use regular Ethernet fabrics to build these virtualized storage area networks.

    They are in a specific niche in which very few (if any) have dared venture. The inspiration for contacting Jeda Networks goes back to an article by Duncan Epping that I read a while back.

    CEO of Jeda Networks Stuart Berman and I had a call last week in which he provided insight into the start of the company and his vision on the Networking and Storage market. Jeda Networks is Stuart’s fourth startup that started 4 years ago. The company was self-funded for 2 years and received external capital 2 years ago.
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    Diablo Technologies MCS: Tech Specs

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    diablo_technologies (1)Diablo Technologies, MCS Tech specs by CEO Riccardo Badalone
    Date: 10 September 2014
    Diablo Technologies Crunchbase Profile

    Following the first part of the interview with Riccardo Badalone, this article goes further into the background of Diablo MCS and the performance it delivers.

    Diablo’s Road to MCS

    Diablo Technologies has been strong in the memory subsystem. From 2003 onwards, the company has always been in the space between the processor and the memory. Essentially creating a layer of abstraction between the physical interface and the logical interface the processor thinks it is communicating with.

    The first development focused on analog IP for high speed serial interconnect. In 2005 Diablo built on top of that with the first product being a bridging product in x86 for fully buffered Dimms; Low power bridges with interface of the processor on one side, interface of DRAM on the other. It was an primarily a physical layer device, no software component. In 2008 the company pivoted, focused purely on flash and non-volatile media. Diablo sought a way out of the DRAM space, while leveraging the expertise and know-how in the memory subsystems.
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