Mangstor, Start-Up in Next-Gen PCIe Flash Controller

Mangstor, Inc., born in 2011 and based in Austin, TX, has developed a technology name iNTSTOR providing high performance NAND flash controller.

The start-up raised $4 million of a planned $5 million financing in July 2013.

Main executives:

• Trevor Smith, co-founder and CEO: He has over 25 years management experience at start-ups, and over 35 years design experience, and most recently was VP of engineering and founder, ServerEngines, acquired by Emulex in 2010 for $159 million. In this role, he delivered high performance networking products resulting in over $150 million revenue. He has held executive roles in start-up and technology companies, including Ross Technology (IPO’ed on Nasdaq in 1995), where he was VP of engineering and founder.
• Paul Prince, CTO:  He was most recently the CTO for the enterprise product group at Dell. Over his seven years at Dell, he led the technology investigations and development that resulted in multiple generations of Dell server, storage, networking, and management software products. Prior to Dell, he was with Intel for thirteen years, where he started by developing supercomputer systems, and ended with leading server platform technology development.
• Ashwin Kamath, co-founder and SVP engineering: He was director of engineering at ServerEngines. His expertise lies in converged network products, RAID storage firmware, IB, and Ethernet switches. While at ServerEngines/Emulex he drove the architecture of the TCP/IP, iSCSI and ROCE offload stacks in four generations of networking/storage CNA products which lead to design wins from major OEMs.

The Mangstor iNTSTOR technology provides high performance NAND flash control, paired with in-storage processing using a power-efficient, high throughput performance 100-core processor. This results in high IO/s with low latency that scales with IO load. The architecture is scalable, with applicability from PCIe card and 2.5-inch drive form factors up to large custom backplane form factors to maximize flash capacities in 1U and 2U flash arrays.

The Mangstor MX6000 Series NVMe storage acceleration products are compatible with the PCIe 3.0 interface. They provide up to 1,000,000/600,000 sustained random read/write IO/s and up to 4.0GB/s bandwidth, for workloads and applications requiring the high performance available from flash memory devices. They offer less then 100?s and 15?s write access latency for mixed R/W workloads requiring low latency response times for transaction processing. They deliver capacity options: two low profile PCIe card form factors with 1.5TB and 2TB available usable capacity and one standard height, and half-length PCIe card with 2.7TB available usable capacity, incorporating NAND flash memory from Toshiba and Micron.

MX6000 combined software controlled features and management capabilities:

• Supports NVMe drivers resulting in high performance data transfers on Windows, Linux, and VMWare OS
• Predictable sustained performance IOPS, bandwidth, and lower-latency
• Scalable in-storage processing built to accelerate data storage and manipulation, accessed directly from user space through NVME extensions
• Enterprise class reliability and availability
• SMART management interface delivers flash specific monitoring and management to accelerate configuration and in-system field updates without taking servers offline

The MX6000 software configurable architecture can be programmed to support multiple NAND vendor flash devices and emerging memory technologies.

MX6000 Series products are sampling to OEMs and select VARs with general availability later this year.

At NAB 2013, the company demonstrates high performance flash storage with Coherent Logix, in C-programmable processors for the embedded systems market.

At recent Flash Memory Summit, Mangstor and Everspin demonstrated the benefits of EMD3D064M Spin Torque-MRAM from Everspin with the MX6000 family. The complete solutions were based on Everspin ST-MRAM with FPGA Altera, memory module supplier SMART Modular Technologies, memory solutions provider Mobiveil, and NVMe storage solutions from Mangstor.

To know more on Mangstor’s technology with three patents published:

• 20140122781, Hierarchical flash translation layer: A flash memory system comprises a flash device operable to store data in a plurality of physical blocks assigned to a plurality of sections, a plurality of Flash Translation Tables stored in a memory comprising a Forward Translation Table that maps a Section to a plurality of physical blocks, and a Sector Translation Table for each Section, the Sector Translation Table operable to map to a Physical Page Number identifying a particular Page, a Page Offset identifying a particular location within the Page, and a Section Local Block Table comprising Block Physical Addresses indexed by a Section Local Block Table ID. Published on 05-01-2014.
• 20140122780, MRAM journal: A flash memory system comprises a logic block interface operable to receive a write command to store data from a host computer, a flash memory device operable to store the data in response to the write command, and a non-volatile memory communicatively coupled to the flash memory device and the logic block interface operable to temporarily store the data, and to provide the stored data to be written to the flash memory device in the event of a disruption during execution of the write command. Published on05-01-2014.
• 20140122779, MRAM journal for MLC flash memory: A flash memory system comprises a logic block interface operable to receive a write command from a host computer, the write command specifying data and a write destination address in a flash memory device, the flash memory device operable to store data at a complementary address corresponding to the specified write destination address. The system further comprises a journal communicatively coupled to the flash memory device and the logic block interface operable to temporarily store data from the complementary address of the flash memory device, and to provide the stored data in the journal to be restored to the flash memory device at the complementary address in the event of an error occurring while executing the write command. Published on 05-01-2014.