Excelero Assigned Patent for Heightened NVMe Storage Efficiency

Excelero Storage Ltd. was assigned US patent #10,237,347 (published March 19, 2019, by USPTO) – its third US patent, with a twelve additional patents pending – governing a technique for multiple remote storage devices to communicate with a SmartNIC.

This IP is already being implemented in the company’s latest NVMesh2 solution and provides customers with more efficient ways to deploy NVMe flash across an enterprise.

With NVMe flash’s growth into a $9 billion market by 2020 from $2 billion in 2017, where an estimated 80% of storage devices will incorporate NVMe storage by 2020 (G2M Research), the rush is on to extract maximum performance and ROI from NVMe SSDs across a network. Doing so will enable enterprises and service providers of all sizes to optimise their infrastructures in the same way as the ‘Tech Giants’ do, with scale-out storage infrastructures leveraging standard servers and software-defined storage solutions.

The firm’s patent, System And Method For Providing A Client Device Seamless Access To A Plurality Of Remote Storage Devices Presented As A Virtual Device, governs an I/O operation as it accesses multiple remotely located storage devices, which is pivotal to obtaining the superior performance and low latency offered by today’s SmartNICs while providing essential storage services. Applications and the OS on the compute nodes, predominantly VMs or containers, interact with the SmartNIC as if it was local storage. In practice, the storage is not local, rather stored on some remote device. To provide a storage layer that is more robust, performant and scalable, instead of using a single remote storage device, multiple devices can be combined.

Company’s just-approved patent has broad-ranging application for virtualised storage that implements other data services from the client side on a SmartNIC, such as global deduplication or global compression or block virtualization across multiple targets. It enables more organisations to achieve the extreme efficiency of today’s Super 8 web-scalers, as they work to maximise capacity utilisation, performance and cost-efficiency with most in-demand applications including AI, machine learning, analytics and databases.

“The market has validated our foresight on applying SmartNICs to heighten virtual storage efficiency,” said Lior Gal, CEO and co-founder, Excelero. “Today’s patent and our remaining 12 patents pending show Excelero’s commitment to constantly pushing the envelope of scale-out NVMe Flash architectures, so that organisations of all sizes can achieve a competitive advantage.”