Smart Storage Systems and Diablo Technologies Enter Partnership

SMART Storage
Systems, Inc., an enterprise SSD technology provider, and Diablo Technologies, Inc., in memory system interface products,
announced an exclusive relationship to combine SMART Storage Systems 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 Memory Channel Storage architecture with Guardian Technology Platform creates a new ULL flash-SSD tier for
enterprise servers and storage systems.

It enables DRAM-like
performance and enterprise flash endurance and reliability, while leveraging
cost-effective MLC NAND flash. 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 improvements in latency,
transaction throughput, IO bandwidth, density, scalability and operating cost
over a range of enterprise deployments when compared to flash-based
designs using PCIe or SAS/SATA-based SSDs. The ULL SSDs are expected to
provide 50% higher transaction rates with 80% lower latency in database caching
and OLTP applications. For virtualized environments, the MCS-Guardian system
solution is expected to enable 10X more VMs per server while reducing DRAM
requirements by over 70%.

“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 ULL SSD product. The product
will be exclusively sold by SMART Storage Systems and will be jointly supported
by the two companies’ customer support teams.