Interview with Alex Benik of Battery Ventures

Battery VenturesBattery Ventures, interview with Alex Benik
Date: 19 Augustus 2014
Battery Ventures CrunchBase profile

I had the honour to speak with Alex Benik, partner at Battery Ventures where he focuses on IT Infrastructure technologies. He previously worked for the Yankee Group.

Battery Ventures is a large fund that invests in a wide variety of start-ups, divided in eCommerce&Retail, Digital Media, Industrial Technologies, Software&Services and Infrastructure.

Alex currently works with a number of known players in IT infrastructure, namely: Diablo Technologies, AppDynamics, Catchpoint, Chef, Cumulus Networks, Nutanix, Primary Data, and Stratoscale.

When he has the time, Alex blogs for GigaOM, where he writes in-depth articles on trends in the infrastructure arena.

I had a brief talk with Alex about his views on the IT infrastructure market and specifically his take on SanDisks acquisition of FusionIO.
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Diablo Technologies steaming towards widely adopted DDR4 Memory Channel Storage

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

    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 Yaron Valler – Hasso Plattner Ventures

    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.
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    Diablo Technologies MCS: Tech Specs

    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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    Interview Riccardo Badalone – CEO Diablo Technologies

    diablo_technologies (1)Diablo Technologies, interview with Riccardo Badalone
    Date: 9 September 2013
    Diablo Technologies Crunchbase Profile

    Riccardo Badalone of Diablo Technologies

    I had a great skypecall with Riccardo Badalone of Diablo Technologies this friday. I heard about Diablo Technologies recently and found myself very interested in the background of this company. The interview is covered in two parts, part 2 goes into the technological details and performance of Diablo MCS and can be found here.

    Riccardo started the company a decade ago in 2003, he cofounded it with Franco Forlini and Michael Parziale. Diablo Technologies is based in Ottowa, Canada.
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