Interview with Alex Benik of Battery Ventures

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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

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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

    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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    Diablo Technologies MCS – Persistent Storage/Memory in DDR3 form factor

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    Diablo Technologies (1)Diablo Technologies MCS introduction
    Date: 30 Augustust 2013
    Diablo Technologies Crunchbase Profile

    I was recently made aware of Diablo Technologies who develop one very interesting product; Memory Channel Storage (MCS).

    -update- Find part 1 of my interview with Riccardo Badalone here and part 2 of that interview with background on Diablo MCS here.

    Diablo MCS are 200 GB / 400 GB NAND flash modules that are designed to connect directly to the memory bus. The product looks like a regular DDR3 RAM module, while featuring persistent NAND flash. MCS modules are plugged right in the memory slots and can be configured to be recognised as Storage or Memory.
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