Western Digital has bought a small startup called Kazan Networks and its NVMe over Fabrics Ethernet connectivity products. Financial terms are undisclosed and the Kazan people are joining WD.
Kazan makes Onyx NVMe target bridge adaptors that enable NVMe JBOFs (Just a Bunch of Flash drives) to connect directly to NVMe-oF networks. The company claims Onyx has the world’s lowest-power, lowest-latency and highest performance for such a bridge.
The company also produces a Fuji ASIC which can do the same job at system board level for smaller NVMe target systems.
WD can use Kazan technology in its IntelliFlash JBOF and OpenFlex composable disaggregated infrastructure (CDI) systems.
Phil Bullinger, head of WD’s data center systems business, provided a quote confirming this: “The addition of Kazan Networks will further expand Western Digital’s leadership in disaggregated data infrastructure and accelerate the advancement of new, CDI-ready NVMe-oF platforms optimised for our customers’ next-generation hyperscale workloads.”
Kazan Networks CEO Margie Evashenk chimed in too: “The close integration of purpose-built controller and storage technology is pivotal to realising the full benefits of advanced next-generation fabric architectures, including lower power, higher performance and lower cost.”
Kazan Networks was founded in Northern California in 2014 and pulled in a $4.5m funding round in July 2016. WD was an investor.
