Kazan Networks Acquired by Western Digital

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In last known 4FQ19 WD records revenue of $1.5 billion in SSDs, down 6% Q/Q and representing 42% of global sales, compared to 58% for HDDs, sequentially up 3%, but the storage company is pushing more its business in flash as the total market of HDDs is currently decreasing.

Small and discreet Kazan Networks, located in Roseville, CA, is a privately-held startup founded in December 2014. 

WD was already an investor in the company when it raised total of $4.5 million in series A funding round in Juy 2016 led by Samsung Ventures, with the participation from Intel Capital.

Kazan was launched by a team of veterans who trace their roots back to the systems business at HP in the early 90s. After being part of the team to create the embedded FC controller (Tachyon and its follow-ons), the team continued to innovate in the areas of iSCSI controllers, FC-to-SATA bridges, SAS controllers, and high-performance networking solutions. This team has been awarded 60 patents in the areas of storage and networking.

The start-up has only $4.4 million in estimated revenue annually, according to crunchbase.

Entrepreneur CEO Margie Evashenk co-founded storage semiconductor start-up Sierra Logic, to overseeing global engineering for Emulex as SVP and chief development executive.

Co-founder and CTO Mike Thompson has architected numerous complex and high-performance ASIC solutions: the first generation Tachyon at HP; an iSCSI controller at Little Mountain Group (which he co-founded in 1999, acquired by QLogic in 2001); the design of 40 and 100Gb rNIC and CNA controllers at Emulex. He holds 18 patents on storage and networking controllers.

Co-founder and VP engineering Murthy Kompella spent the majority of his 24 years designing and implementing storage and networking controllers. He has led teams from concept to final product on over two dozen ASICs while at HP, Agilent, Sierra Logic, and Emulex. He has been awarded 15 patents for his ASIC design work.

NVMe is now becoming the most popular standard interface for high-performance SSDs. Developed in 2010 and released as a standard a year later, it represents an architecture for I/O with none of the limitations of FC, SAS, or SATA.

NVMe-oF, with version 1.0 having been released in June of 2016. By mapping the NVMe command set onto an existing fabric, the number of devices one could attach to a system goes from a handful to thousands.
This acquisition is consequently an excellent deal for WD  - even if the price was not revealed but probably n the tens of million dollar range - as the storage giant could be able to be the first to launch a NVMe-oF SSD upgrading its current available NVMe PCIe drive offerings.

Kazan implemented entire I/O path in hardware with following performances:

• Running 4KB I/Os, its Fuji ASIC is able to push over 2.8 million I/Os through an NVMe-oF infrastructure.
• Running 128KB I/Os, that same Fuji ASIC can move 11.8GB/s through a single 100GbE pipe.
• Fuji's internal latency through the ASIC is 430 nanoseconds. How that translates to running real I/Os is that the average latency to a drive, even the fastest of drives based on 3D-Xpoint technology, according to the company, to get no latency penalty for remote-attached storage.

Two products are offered:

Onyx NVMe-oF bridge adapter KN-ONYX1.0

Designed to enable NVMe JBOFs to connect directly to an NVMe-oF network, Onyx plugs into a standard x16 PCIe slot in a JBOF. A single Onyx board is capable of delivering 2.8 million IO/s (4kB) and over 11.5GB/s of bandwidth.  Add up to 6 Onyx adapters to a 2U/24SSD JBOF will achieve 16 million IO/s and 65GB/s. 

Fuji NVMe-oF bridge ASIC KN-103-A0

It enables integration at the ASIC level via the new Fuji ASIC. Designed to enable low cost, low power JBOF/EBOF/FBOF systems, Fuji can be integrated onto a system's I/O board, eliminating the expense of add-in card (AIC) form factors. 

Kazan is ramping production with Onyx and Fuji ASIC.

All WD's acquisitions around flash and SSDs