'We've got $6m and we will use it to REVOLUTIONISE storage'

Startup company's amazing claim

Nimbus, Solidfire and Pure Storage better look out: there's a new flash kid on the storage block.

Behold Skyera, previously known as StorCloud, another stealthy flash array startup developing technology that it wants to apply to all storage area networking (SAN) use cases.

Its sales VP, Dave Ferretti, said the Silicon Valley-based firm is developing the "first 100 per cent solid state-based storage arrays scalable from 5TB to 1PB+ shared flat file/block storage enabling next generation Cloud, enterprise, midrange and SMB storage of 100X performance and 10X lower power vs. HDD-based systems at price parity."

Skyera's website says: "We are bringing novel flash memory-based systems, comprising storage and networking to the enterprise." Its premise is that its technology can store all the data that can be stored on a SAN array. This is an amazing claim. But does the start-up have a realistic hope of achieving it?

Skyera's marketing VP Stephen Smith told The Reg that the company will offer flat and unified storage which will scale to multi-petabytes of capacity and provide more than 1 billion IOPS at a price/GB lower than a disk drive array in 2014.

Skyera was jointly founded in July 2010 by CEO Radoslav Danilak – the founder and CTO of SandForce, the MLC flash controller company which was bought by LSI in October last year for $322m – and chief architect Rod Mullendore, whose background includes stints at storage networking suppliers Brocade, McData and Nishan Systems.

So far the start-up has raised $6m of seed capital and it hopes for a product launch before the end of the year; in May it talked about "the upcoming launch of our first product line, [with which] we will deliver a truly revolutionary product that will change the face of the solid state storage industry and take a market leadership position.”

On the networking side, we understand PCIe, 1 and 10Gbit/E, iSCSI, FCoE, Fibre Channel and InfiniBand could all be supported.

The company is making some pretty big claims. Danilak said: "Until now, vendors have attempted to either address the challenges of storage or the challenges of networking, but they haven't yet cohesively approached both issues that enterprises face every day. We are attacking the whole infrastructure in a way that no other SSD vendor is today. Using MLC flash memory, we will deliver a higher performance, more intelligent solid-state architecture that will help companies overcome the limitations that are currently hampering IT transformation.”

Skyera claims its flash controller will extend flash endurance one hundred-fold. There's more from Danilak in the video below. ®