Ethernet Flash Drives from Silvercor

Silvercor, Inc., headquartered in Milpitas, CA and founded in 2012, is playing in the Ethernet storage market segment.

The company has designed a new storage element named an Ethernet Flash drive but doesn’t build the drive itself, they assemble different components together. The unit is finally the union of a flash drive, a CPU board fully equipped with a Linux OS and an Ethernet NIC(s) from Mellanox. The processing unit selected is an AMD Embedded G-Series SoC CPU. Drives uses PoE aka Power over Ethernet.

Silvercor offers two models:

• Refugio with 1GbE and
• Magnum with 10GbE, both can use quad or dual 64bits x86 cores

Silvercor Magnum 10GbE Flash Drives series

In term of usage you can use this as a target block device over iSCSI and unify multiple of these independent block devices with a volume manager on the host. A hypervisor can run also on the ‘drive’ or it can be a component of a more global object storage farm, both approaches work.

Silvercor go-to-market strategy is indirect via OEMs and alliances.

In such category you can find Igneous who targets capacity projects based on HDD and S3 API.