Skyera, New Company in MLC SSD Controller

Skyera Inc., founded by an executive and engineering team with backgrounds in the solid-state, storage and networking arenas, is creating enterprise solid-state storage systems that deliver performance and density at a price parity equivalent to today’s hard disk drive-based enterprise SANs.

The company is developing system-level solid-state storage systems that combine storage and network connectivity to achieve greater speed, reliability and efficiency than both traditional and solid-state solutions on the market today. By building a new architecture from the ground up, rather than taking an incremental approach, Skyera it leverage the benefits of next-generation flash memory while overcoming the limitations faced by solution vendors that shoehorn SSD devices into existing systems.

The company is headed by CEO Dr. Radoslav Danilak, who co-founded SSD controller company SandForce, which was acquired by LSI Logic for $370 million last year. He was a senior chipset and graphics processor architect at NVIDIA, and prior to that, held senior engineering and architect positions at Nishan Systems, Toshiba, Gizmo Technologies and DanSoft.

Chief architect Rodney Mullendore was a chief hardware architect at SandForce, co-founder and hardware architect at Nishan Systems (acquired by McData), technical director at McData (acquired by Brocade) and principal engineer at Brocade. Previously, he developed hardware and software for high reliability instrumentation systems at Sandia National Labs.

Skyera’s core engineering team is assembled from technology providers such as Brocade, Cisco, EMC, EVault, Hitachi, Intel, NVIDIA, STEC and Toshiba.

Combined, the members of the Skyera team have been awarded more than 60 patents.

Private equity has seeded the company with $6 million.

"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," said Danilak. "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 is developing enterprise solid-state storage systems based on their flash controller built from the ground up that will extend flash endurance by 100x.

To see the Skyera flash memory controller video

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Skyera, in SSD systems