SMART Storage Systems and Diablo Technologies Enter Partnership to Deliver New Ultra-Low Latency Memory Channel Storage

OTTAWA, Canada and NEWARK, Calif. - SMART Storage Systems, Inc., an innovative enterprise solid-state drive (SSD) technology provider, and Diablo Technologies, Inc., a proven innovator in memory system interface products, today announced an exclusive relationship to combine SMART Storage Systems' award-winning Guardian Technology Platform with Diablo's Memory Channel Storage (MCS) to usher in a new era of Flash storage. The development and marketing partnership will result in a new class of ultra-low latency (ULL) SSDs and system accelerators, transforming enterprise server, virtualization and cloud environments.

The fusion of Diablo's Memory Channel Storage architecture with SMART Storage Systems' Guardian Technology Platform creates a new ULL Flash-SSD tier for enterprise servers and storage systems. This new ULL SSD enables DRAM-like performance and enterprise-class Flash endurance and reliability, while leveraging cost-effective multi-level cell (MLC) NAND Flash. SMART Storage Systems' proprietary Guardian Technology Platform drives additional endurance from cost-effective MLC Flash through a proprietary suite of enterprise features and endurance enhancement technologies.

"Flash technology is a key building block in the enterprise, with the caveat that greater performance, higher capacity and more cost-effective solutions are required to fuel specific needs of applications like data analytics and the full promise of cloud computing," said Jeff Janukowicz, Research Director for Solid State Storage at IDC. "Advances in system design, as is anticipated through this partnership, will enable volume deployments and NAND Flash to transform the enterprise data center."

The combination of MCS and the Guardian Technology Platform will provide systems with dramatic improvements in latency, transaction throughput, IO bandwidth, density, scalability and operating cost over a wide range of enterprise-level deployments when compared to Flash-based designs using PCIe or SAS/SATA-based SSDs. The new ULL SSDs are expected to provide 50 percent higher transaction rates with 80 percent lower latency in database caching and OLTP applications. For virtualized environments, the MCS-Guardian system solution is expected to enable 10X more virtual machines per server while reducing DRAM requirements by over 70 percent.

"This really changes everything," said John Scaramuzzo, president of SMART Storage Systems. "The convergence of Diablo's groundbreaking MCS technology and our award-winning Guardian Technology Platform is not just about re-architecting storage, but re-architecting the integration of servers, storage and Flash acceleration. We are setting a new standard for ULL storage in the enterprise, improving performance over currently available SSDs, including PCIe-based drives."

"SMART Storage Systems was the logical partner for us in this development effort. SMART Storage Systems specializes in meeting enterprise requirements for quality, endurance and performance using the most cost-effective Flash media, and its Guardian Technology Platform has harnessed the physics of NAND Flash to make new Flash applications possible," said Diablo founder and CEO Riccardo Badalone. "Our partnership with SMART Storage Systems will accelerate Memory Channel Storage product innovation and fuel new deployments of Flash storage in enterprise data centers, which are currently restricted by traditional CPU/Flash interfaces and the cost limitations of providing enterprise-grade NAND Flash."

Under the terms of the agreement SMART Storage Systems and Diablo will jointly develop the new ULL SSD product. The product will be exclusively sold by SMART Storage Systems and will be jointly supported by the two companies' world-class customer support teams.

Last updated: Apr 7, 2020 at 01:08 pm CDT