Start-Up Enmotus in Sub-Hypervisor SSD Tiering

Enmotus, Inc. demonstrated a new class of automated MicroTiering technology for virtual and physical servers at the Server Summit show in Santa Clara, CA on November 27-28..

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The technology will allow SSDs and HDDs to be virtualized and integrated into bare metal virtual and physical enterprise or cloud servers without the need for custom drivers or software, broadening SSD adoption in more mainstream server markets.

"Compared to today’s SSD caching approaches, MicroTiering offers a true data tiering solution for all types of storage-servers that significantly outperforms and reduces caching induced SSD write amplification to near zero," said Andy Mills, co-founder and CEO of Enmotus. "High performance SSD caching approaches result in a high level of excessive wear, and we think we have a novel approach that eliminates this issue and more."

Mills presented a paper at the Server Design Summit titled SSDs: Practical Ways to Accelerate Virtual Servers.

The company plans to offer several flavors of MicroTiering early next year.

"Let’s clear up any remaining misconceptions that tiering and caching are synonymous," said Mark Peters, senior analyst at the Enterprise Strategy Group. "They are quite different: tiering essentially creates a virtual pool of available storage, and moves the most frequently accessed or more active data to the faster tier – which in Enmotus’ case is flash, with the solid-state capacity being additive to the overall storage pool. Tiering is unlike caching, because the latter simply creates a temporary copy of the most accessed or active data in the cache; with tiering, the SSD operates as primary storage with no requirement to ‘flush’ the cache, which means less overhead and lower wear on the solid-state."

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Born in 2010, Enmotus was co-founded by Andy Mills and Marshall Lee. The start-up, based in Aliso Viejo, CA, received a $500,000 investment in October 2011.

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President and CEO Mills was VP marketing for Dot Hill where he led the server Virtual RAID adapter and storage virtualization appliance strategies. At Dot Hill he worked with Dell and HP on storage OEM solutions for servers and appliances, and also re-started Dot Hill's efforts in the VAR channel. He joined Dot Hill through an acquisition of Ciprico in 2008, where as SVP marketing and development, he created a new product and business strategy based around the acquired assets of RAIDCore from Broadcom. Prior to that, he was president and CEO of NetCell, a VC-backed semiconductor storage company targeting prosumer and small business storage applications. He held prior positions in general management, marketing, field applications and design engineering at TDK Semiconductor, Rockwell Semiconductor, AMD USA, AMD UK and Ferranti Computer Systems in the UK.

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CTO and VP engineering Lee was EVP engineering of Emulex, where he was responsible for all FC and IP storage engineering operations, and served as primary liaison between the engineering teams and senior-level executives. Prior that, he served as VP engineering of Quantum. He held numerous senior management positions during his six years in this company, managing a range of ASIC, hardware and software development teams. Formerly he held senior engineering management positions at IBM, Maxtor and WD and helped WD startup in the HDD business with the first Caviar family disk drive.

Both of them are on the Enmotus' board of directors with famous Sirjang (Jugi) Tandon, founder in 1975 of Tandon that later merged with the chip controller company WD.