Skyera Unveiling Next-Gen All-Flash Enterprise Storage Arrays

Skyera Inc. announced the skyEagle Series, all-flash enterprise storage arrays with the reliability, performance and capacity to handle mission critical data center applications below the price per gigabyte of legacy disk-based arrays.

Based on Skyera’s third-generation solid-state platform, the series introduced last year in the skyHawk array, adding active/active controllers for HA, synchronous/asynchronous replication, converged networks, protocols, and storage, and a 500GB capacity in a 1U form factor – more than 2.5PB after compression and deduplication. In addition, performance had been improved up to 5 million IO/s.

By leveraging the high density of the Most Advanced 1y/1z NAND (MAN) flash chips, combined with its proprietary flash controller and hardware accelerated services, Skyera has boosted the capacity and performance of skyEagle by a factor of 10 over the skyHawk array in one year.

Skyera has also set a list price for the read-optimized 500TB skyEagle storage system of $1.99/GB, or $.49/GB with data reduction technologies.

The skyEagle series offers 16 interchangeable 16Gb FC and 10GbE ports supporting a mix of FC and iSCSI block-based SAN protocols, as well as an option for 96 lanes of PCIe connectivity. Support for NFS and SMB makes skyEagle a converged enterprise storage solution.

"Big data and analytics; public, private and hybrid cloud infrastructures; and virtualized environments demand highly-available storage but that is only one piece of the storage infrastructure," said Radoslav Danilak, CEO, Skyera. "With the introduction of skyEagle, Skyera has created a next-generation all-flash platform with an optimal balance of storage availability, usable flash capacity performance and enterprise durability."

"skyHawk’s introduction last year put us in a class by ourselves in regards to capacity and performance," said Frankie Roohparvar, COO, Skyera. "We felt that our only competition was us, and now we have disrupted ourselves not by a factor of 2 over 18 months in accordance with Moore’s law, but by over 10 times the performance and capacity in just 12 months."

Skyera’s innovations in flash controller design and adaptive read-write techniques make the company an enterprise flash array supplier capable of utilizing MAN flash chips, bringing a huge capacity boost to skyEagle without the penalties commonly associated with these chips. As NAND flash geometries shrink below 20nm with the newest products, the durability and performance of the media are reduced below the standards demanded for enterprise data center environments. However, Skyera’s 100x life amplification technology eliminates those issues.

In addition, Skyera is working with the flash vendors to tune the performance and durability characteristics of the MLC media so that media is optimized for the skyEagle platform. The result is that Skyera is able to leverage the economy of MAN Flash with capacity while producing enterprise durability and performance at a price point that is moving below hard-disk based systems.