Graid Technology Announces Strategic License Agreement with Intel Corporation to Accelerate RAID Innovation

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Immediately we react positively to this news and understand this is in favor of Graid, Intel and users. Intel needs to "reinvent itself", in other words to concentrate on its core activity and clearly, even if RAID is important for users so for Intel, the company had to decide something on this in its rationalization moment. For Graid, it confirms the role of the company in the domain and validates what the team has done for several years innovating with a radical new approach. It also represents a huge business opportunity adopting Intel's installed base extending its own product line on the server side. And for users, it protects their investment as they will be able to continue to use this solution.

This "consolidation" is even more significant in the NVMe world we live in.

The key question here is where does the disk protection control exist and run? On the market, we have several approaches - source, target or in between - or to say that differently within servers/workstations, arrays or the network. We can also split by software vs. hardware but it is probably a too simple segmentation.

The first model - source or servers/workstations - can be instantiated with software, this Intel processor feature or special cards. By software, we mean OS functions like Disk Management utility on Windows or on Linux services like mdadm, LVM (Logical Volume Manager) with Red Hat one following Sistina acquisition in 2003, but also external ones like the famous Veritas VxVM (now offered by Arctera with InfoScale), as independent layer or natively coupled with file system like with ZFS or Btrfs, or more recent iterations with maxRAID from Wildfire Technology or Xinnor xiRAID but also OWC SoftRAID to name a few. Card approach is covered historically by Adaptec, now Microchip marketed under the SmartRAID brand, following different lives at PMC-Sierra and Microsemi due to acquisitions waves, and Broadcom (Avago Technologies) MegaRAID offerings leveraging LSI acquisition in 2014. Obviously Graid plays in this domain with their GPU-based RAID card, the SupremeRAID product line, being a real innovation with interesting hardware and software combination.

Of course the second model is represented by RAID controllers embedded in arrays exposing volumes "outside" over the network or in direct attach mode. We have plenty of names in mind.

We must mention also the block SDS - Software Defined Storage - model that also integrates RAID protection across nodes or disk or volumes. Historically, the industry invented some models like SAN virtualization that also offer this mode, it was deployed with appliance or software as well, with in-band or out-of-band models.

Beyond this, DPU - Data Processing Unit -  also iterated interesting developments in this area that can be positioned at different places in the configuration. It also marks a shift from disk protection to data protection as disk - HDD or SSD - increase rapidly in size. Some approaches changes from coupling disks to coupling sub-disk portions or even data segments. We even see some implementations at file levels in some distributed environments.

Worth mentioning, Intel has offered to the market, now in open source, the ISA-L library and extended the RAID approach with more global erasure coding mechanisms. This is available on Github.

With this deal, Graid immediately changes its profile with 35 new people dedicated to this Intel technology. This new dimension obviously solidifies their position on the market. We'll see how competitors will react to this announcement especially in the ODM/OEM ecosystem.