Start-Up Burlywood Exits Stealth Mode

Founded in January 2015 and based in Longmont, CO, small start-up Burlywood, Inc. exits stealth mode last August during recent Flash Memory Summit where it wins the Most Innovative Flash Memory Technology Award.

Company’s name means a brown sandy color.

The firm got a total of $3.7 million in financial funding, one at $0.1 million in 2015 (for total private offering of $1.50 million) and then two representing $3.6 million this year.

CEO, president and founder is Tod Roland Earhart, mainly working during his career in Longmont, CO, a city with historically a lot of storage companies. He was previously during two months IP and systems architecture consultant at Akonia Holographics, after more than two years as director of firmware development for Micron Technologies and formerly firmware manager and senior staff firmware engineer at Western Digital. From 2011 to 2008 he worked at InPhase Technologies as engineering manager, architect and firmware engineer. He was recruited in 1989 by Hewlett Packard and left the company in 2001 as R&D director. His first job from 1986 to 1989 was chief firmware engineer for GTE/AT&T Communications Systems.

On the first page of company’s web site, the start-up estimated it is “reinventing flash” with “the next-generation flash storage solution for the all-flash data center.”

It has built an architecture that allows for rapid integration of customer specified requirements across interfaces, protocols, FTL, QoS, capacity, flash types, and form-factor with the following benefits, according to the company:

• Flash multisourcing: Allows for multi-sourcing of 3D TLC/QLC flash for single SSD controller
• Performance tuned: Can be tuned to customers environment and workloads
• Capacity scaling: Scales to capacities of more than 100TB with one controller
• Data center optimized: Integrated multi-stream QoS provides advanced traffic management and consistent performance
• Dedicated support: Technical and strategic support during all phases of lifecycle

The controller architecture accelerates time-to-market of new NAND adoption while delivering cost and performance benefits to cloud, all-flash-array, and hyperconverged OEM customers.

The start-up explains: “With the insatiable demand for more flash storage at lower costs, NAND nodes are accelerating faster than SSD controller capabilities. The traditional SOC+FW qualification model cannot keep up and provide time-to-market costs benefits.“

“Today’s controllers are built ahead of the NAND with limited flexibility for custom solutions that can take advantage of the faster 3D NAND innovation cycle,” said Earhart. “Even in the case where SSD companies manufacture their own controller and NAND, they are not immune to delays in controller re-spins or additional firmware delays.”

Jay Kramer, chairman of the FMS Awards Program and president of Network Storage Advisors Inc., said: “We are proud to select Burlywood TrueFlash for the Best of Show Technology Innovation Award as it is the industry’s first modular controller architecture with the flexibility to integrate with new NAND technology for a total solution that can be deployed in flash storage arrays for a variety of implementations including hyperconverged and cloud infrastructure.”

Built on the Xilinx UltraScale+ FPGA, TrueFlash takes advantage of Xilinx’s programmability and performance to optimize solutions for both NAND and applications. Customers can now qualify multiple NAND types using the same controller in weeks, versus quarters.

Burlywood’s history and IP stem from storage controller technology that was built to manage high defect and high error rate media.

We discovered at least one patent (9,703,631) assigned by the company and developed by Earhart for a “storage emulation in a storage controller.” It concerns “a method of operating a storage controller is provided. The method includes receiving first host data traffic from a host, for storage in a first partition within a storage system, the first host data traffic formatted for storage in a first type of data storage, and translating the first host data traffic into storage data, the storage data formatted for storage in a second type of data storage. The method further includes storing the storage data in the first partition, receiving a read request from the host through the host interface, and retrieving some or all of the storage data from the first partition. The method also includes formatting the some or all of the storage data into a format compatible with the first host data traffic, and transferring the formatted data to the host in a configuration corresponding to the first type of data storage.”