News

posted on 20 February 2008 13:18

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Start-up Pliant Technology is developing Enterprise Flash Drives (EFDs) with advanced new controller hardware and software to deliver better performance, reliability, power reductions and cost savings compared to today's hard drives.

The company has just gained $8 million round A venture capitalist funding. That's not a huge amount.

The need for the development of flash-drive focussed controllers to deliver more flash solid state disk (SSD) benefits to servers has been highlighted by Pillar Data CEO Mike Workman. Pliant believes that current flash SSD products are "little more than re-packaged consumer solid state storage".

The company has an impressive set of management talent:-

Jim McCoy, Chairman – Co-Founder of Maxtor and Quantum
Amyl Ahola, CEO – Former CEO of TeraStor, vice president at Seagate and Control Data
Mike Chenery, President/Founder – Former vice president of advanced product engineering at Fujitsu
Doug Prins, Founder/Chief Architect – Former consultant for Fujitsu, Emulex, and Q-Logic
Aaron Olbrich, Founder/CTO – Formerly at Fujitsu and IBM

This is how the company pitches its approach:-

"Today, high-performance enterprise IT computing systems are increasingly constrained by the limits of traditional hard drive technology that can provide only incremental improvements in transactional performance. As a result, many IT managers have had to increase I/O performance by over provisioning hard drives resulting in significantly higher cost, power consumption and failure rates. At the same time, current attempts to improve performance using solid state storage solutions are falling short of enterprise system needs, delivering only marginal performance improvements in little more than re-packaged consumer Flash solid state storage."

Pliant's CEO, Amyl Ahola, is quoted thus: “Pliant’s innovative vision and technology approach is possible because of the extensive collective experience of a team with an unmatched track record of success in the storage industry. We are well on track to deliver the industry’s first truly innovative EFD solution later this year – a device that will deliver unequaled enterprise performance and reliability while at the same time enabling significant cost saving and power reductions compared to today’s best performing hard drives. We believe that these exponential performance and efficiency gains will allow organizations to dramatically expand the capabilities of their systems in new and innovative ways.”

The claims are quite believable except the "significant cost savings ... (than Fibre Channel) hard drives." That is a stretch.

Pliant is not a semi-conductor FAb company; $8 million wouldn't buy it a fab anyway. It's a controller technology company, developing a new and advanced controller design and software architecture, that it says will integrate seamlessly into existing enterprise information systems. It will deliver exponential improvements over today’s highest performing hard drive and SSD storage solutions for a range of data I/O-intensive enterprise applications.

On its website it's looking for a SCSI firmware designer with SAS, SATA or Fibre Channel experience.

So it will use commercially available flash chips built into some form factor and presented through its new controller as disk drives to existing servers and their operating systems. Thus it will be constrained by existing flash chip prices and it is quite hard to see how the cost of a new controller plus gigabytes of flash chips can be less than a Symmetrix or high end HDS array. Bated breath is the order of the day while we wait.

The waiting period is until the fourth quarter of this year when Pliant's controller products will be delivered. It will be available to both OEM and data centre customers. That latter category is interesting. Data centre customers don't buy solid state disk storage controllers on their own. Will the product set include a flash controller plus SSDs in a single unit?

If it will then a series B funding round may be necessary; as I said above, $8 million is not a lot of cash.

As a OEM supplier Pliant could sell its controllers to any drive array vendor needing a fast flash SSD tier 0 infusion in its product line to compete better with EMC and its flash-enable Symmetrix. As such Pliant would work with flash SSD foundries and flash SSD (sans controller) suppliers.

It is probable that OEM drive array vendors such as Dot Hill, LSI and Xyratex are also looking at flash controller technology developments. Ditto 3PAR, Pillar, etc. No-one wants to get left behind with slow disk as flash-enhanced drive arrays leave them in the dust.