Start-Up Profile: Ambedded Technology

Company
Ambedded Technology Co., Ltd.
 
Location
HQs in Taipei, Taiwan, and office in Irvine, CA

Founded in
February 1, 2013

Financial funding
$500,000 in seed round, not yet with series A; in 2013 Cynny Spa acquired a 2% stake in Ambedded Technologies

Revenue
$350,000 in 2015

Main executives

• Founder and CEO Aaron Joue, expert in computer and IT experiences in design, manufacturing and marketing, previously at Acrosser Technology Co., Ltd during ten years

• CTO Swapnil Jain, passionate in open source software development, Red Hat certified instructor
• CFO Shirley Chou, experienced in banking and financial
• Business director Dominique Sun

Number of employees
9

Technology
Distributed software storage powered by ARM-based microserver cluster

Products description
The microserver architecture is designed for distributed storage. It is integrating multiple microservers in a 1U server chassis and linked all of them together with in-chassis switch controller to provide the cluster fabric. Each microserver has an ARM-based low power SoC, DDR DRAM, dual Ethernet ports and SATA port. The dual Ethernet ports provide dedicated in-cluster network and public network. Each microserver attaches single storage device through its SATA interface.

The three models of ARM microserver:

• Cy7
  • ARM v7 armada 370 Solo at 1GHz
  • Peer to peer 1Gb/s, with 2x1Gb/s uplink
  • Each microserver with one HDD (SATA2)

Cy7: 7 Nodes ARM microserver

• Cy21
  • ARM v7 armada 370 Solo at 1GHz
  • Peer to peer 1Gb/s, with 2x11Gb/s uplink
  • Each microserver with one SSD (SATA2)
• Mars 200
  • ARM v7 armada 385 Dual at 1.6GHz
  • Peer to peer 2.5Gb/s, 4x10Gb/s uplink
  • System management via BMC

According to Ambedded, ARM microserver cluster is a better solution for distributed storage because:

• Dedicated resource on CPU, DRAM, network, and storage bandwidth for every storage device to provide stable performance
• Aggregated network bandwidth to eliminate the bottleneck in a low cost way
• One microserver connect to only one storage device, reducing the lost of single point failure
• Low power consumption and cooling cost
• Lower TCO

The software-defined storage is supported by Ceph and GlusterFS to offer unified scale out storage solution for object storage, block storage and file sharing system.

Software-defined storage use distributed object storage

Released date
Cy7: 3Q14
Cy21: 4Q14
Mars 200: 1Q16

Prices
$800 to $2,500 for ARM microserver cluster hardare Only

Roadmap
Mars 200 with Ceph UI planned for 2Q16, 64bits ARM microserver cluster – still focus on microserver, not 32/48 cores extreme performance series

Partners
Cynny Space and Cynny SPA

Distributors
Not yet

Applications
Scale-out storage, based on object storage software

Target market
Data center, SI for data center, storage device channel, enterprise customer

Competitors
Companies offering software-defined storage based on x86 or commodity hardware