Burlywood FlashOS Drives SSD Industry Transformation: Consumer-Grade NAND Is Solution for Data Centers

Burlywood, Inc. achieves industry sought after breakthrough in endurance with a 3x advantage over data center competitors.

FlashOS 2.0. enables the use of low cost, cTLC (consumer-grade Triple-level Cell) NAND in mainstream data center applications and greatly expands the use cases for QLC (Quad Level Cell). NAND is the dominating factor in SSD cost, and with FlashOS 2.0, products using the company’s technology can take advantage of NAND that has a 20-35% lower cost than enterprise-grade NAND.

The firm’s low write amplification enables the use of lower endurance cTLC where competitors require eTLC (enterprise-grade Triple-level Cell) NAND.

“Along with the best performance and latency, our partners also benefit from significantly lower cost SSDs with FlashOS 2.0,” says Mike Jones, CEO. “In random workloads with hot/cold content, we achieved a 3x lower write amp than a top industry competitor, and a DWPD (Drive Writes Per Day) of 1.6 compared to top competitors at 0.5 DWPD using cTLC.”

More of findings include: 

DWPD = Drive Writes Per Day (5 years)

eTLC = enterprise-grade Triple-level Cell | cTLC = consumer-grade Triple-level Cell | QLC = Quad-level Cell

FlashOS has a Self-Adaptive Architecture driven by the analysis of real production workloads, providing visibility for data placement intelligence to optimize performance and efficiency.

“Our tenacity and focus on real workloads, not benchmarks, and the development of tools to validate endurance in the system has enabled us to build an enhanced endurance technology,” says Tod Earhart, founder and CTO.

The company was founded to design and build technology optimized for how SSDs are and will be used in the data center. SSDs, now mainstream, should no longer be optimized to legacy HDD benchmarks and standards. Collecting and analyzing amounts of real production workloads for years has enabled the development of FlashOS, a different, workload intelligent software design embedded inside the SSD. FlashOS enables workload aware SSDs, breaking free from the limitations and legacy of HDDs.

Additional FlashOS advantages: 

• Industry’s lowest write amplification.
• Highest sustained performance on real production workloads. 
• Lowest, most consistent latency over life.
• Highest endurance, enabling the use of lower cost NAND in more demanding applications.
• Lower TCO through higher endurance.
• Additional cost savings with ability to use consumer-grade NAND (cTLC and QLC).
• Best performance in write-heavy and hot/cold workload environments.

“Our partners were inspired by the value of FlashOS and can’t wait to take products to market using FlashOS 2.0,” says Jay Bradley, CRO and VP, Burlywood. “You can expect cTLC product availability in 2Q23.” 

The company is transforming what the industry expects from an SSD. In addition to innovative technology, the firm offers tools to measure production workloads so customers can know their endurance requirements. This gives SSD buyers and manufacturers the confidence to use cTLC and QLC NAND.

“Burlywood is committed to enabling large users of data center storage to have more choices in SSD technology and for them to have the application workload data required to make informed decisions,” says Jones.

To see how storage costs are growing with growing use and how cTLC can drive savings, the firm offers an online calculator.