111th in Our Worldwide List, Fastor Systems, New One in SSD

Founded in 2011 and based in Santa Clara, CA, Fastor Systems, Inc. is the last name known in SSDs.

It is supposed to launch in mid-2013 an NVMe compliant PCIe SSD.

"This SSD is based on a revolutionary network-oriented architecture (patent pending). This will be the first ‘post-controller’ SSD, in which the control and data planes are de-coupled and data congestion resulting from flash controller bus contention is eliminated," wrote the company on its web site.

Fastor Systems is privately funded and held, and in the process of expanding its investor network.

Main executives are:

Dan Mahoney, CEO, is a 28-year semiconductor industry veteran who served as the CEO of Renesas Electronics America from 2001 through 2011. He led the 2003 Hitachi-Mitsubishi merger and 2010 Renesas-NEC Electronics merger in North America.
Ajoy Aswadhati, CTO and founder, is a 23-year electronics industry veteran. He was VP engineering at Force10 Networks.
Mark Schroeder, CFO and founder, brings 12 years of operations and business development experience with Silicon Valley technology companies, and was director of business development at CymMetrik.
Tony Carbone, VP marketing and business development, was formerly chief of staff, office of the CFO, for SanDisk.

At the board of advisors, there is Anand Babu Periasamy founder and CTO of Gluster, which was acquired by Red Hat where he is now in the CTO office.

Comments

NVMe compliant PCIe SSDs, as defined by the NVM Express Workgroup, could be the most successful interface for enterprise SSDs in the years to come, already adopted by IDT, Samsung and WD, to be followed Cisco, Dell, EMC, HGST, Intel, LSI, Marvell, Micron, NetApp, Oracle, SanDisk, sTec an others.

It's the faster one, and consequently the best one, to utilize the full potential of flash memories' speed in term of latency and throughput with PCIe Gen 3 at 32GB/s for x16 link and Gen 4 to come in the coming years, better than the new 12Gb/s SAS.

By standardizing the interface of SSDs with NVMe, OS only needs one driver for all SSDs.

Fastor Systems is the 112th SSD maker in the world, according to our list.