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Pobierz
Radoslav Danilak
Co-founder & CEO
of Skyera
▷
Electrical Engineering Community
CONTENTS
Bringing your
PULSE
concepts
to
reality
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Radoslav Danilak
CO-FOUNDER & CEO OF SKYERA
How this new enterprise storage company is
making waves with its solid-state array.
is as easy as...
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3.
Featured Products
This week’s latest products from EEWeb.
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SkyHawk Storage System
Skyera’s all-Flash array overcomes common
endurance limitations, making it 10x more
reliable than eMLC Flash.
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How to GaN
A look at driver and layout considerations
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Return to Zero Comic
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Copyright ©2013 Aspen Labs LLC.
INTERVIEW
PULSE
Skyera is a rising provider of enterprise storage systems. Founded in 2012, Skyera has been making
waves in the industry with their extraordinarily high performance storage system, the skyHawk. This
groundbreaking storage platform combines affordability and unparalleled speeds and capacity.
The company’s co-founder and CEO, Radoslav Danilak, has been in the solid-state
storage industry his entire career. From the memory division of Toshiba to creating
the world’s best Flash controller at SandForce, Danilak assembled a qualiied
team from his past experiences to start a company aimed at transforming the
industry. We spoke with Danilak about the company’s unique
approach to innovation and how they integrated off-
the-shelf components to create a storage
system that far surpasses any other
system on the market today.
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INTERVIEW
PULSE
skyHawk Stack
Is your solid-state memory
device using SSDs from a
manufacturer like Micron, Intel
or Samsung, or are you developing
a custom-designed system?
“At Skyera, what is fundamentally different is that
these vendors know that we are so far separated from
components that cooperation is not a problem. In fact,
most of the largest manufacturers of the NAND Flash
commodity components are investors in our company.”
Excellent question. If you look at SSDs, most
of them are commodity or consumer grade
and others are built for existing storage
systems so they can plug them into the
system and sell them. What we realized
in the beginning was that plugging solid-
state into existing ecosystems using SSD
was not the way to go. We realized that
SSD-based arrays, which are different than
solid-state arrays, have no future in the
market. We therefore decided not to build
pure imitations of these SSD-based systems.
If you are building storage arrays from SSDs,
they are way more expensive because
of margin stacking where SSD vendors
buy chips and software to support their
NAND Flash with proit margins from each
component raising the cost of the SSD.
How does Skyera differ from your
previous Flash ventures?
beginning it was self-funded, but then Western
Digital, the world largest hard drive vendor,
basically saw how these two technologies could
amplify each other and provided initial funding
for us. In January, we announced a $51 million
institutional funding round led by Dell Ventures
and several NAND Flash vendors.
During my previous tenure, the NAND Flash
vendors were always viewed as potential
competitors. Instead of selling us NAND for
40% margins, they wanted to sell it for 50%,
which completely makes sense. At Skyera,
what is fundamentally different is that these
vendors know that we are so far separated from
components that cooperation is not a problem.
In fact, most of the largest manufacturers of
the NAND Flash commodity components are
investors in our company.
The economical advantage is that we
removed the margin stacking by buying
all the NAND Flash components and
developing an onboard Flash controller
and other intellectual property in-house.
This allows us to achieve much better
eficiency and lower costs than SSD-based
systems. Historically, if you look at when the
new generation Flash showed up, typically
SSDs use Flash with a 12-month delay. If you
are buying SSDs, you will be stuck with older
generations of Flash because of this delay.
Having our own controller puts us ahead
of the SSD-based storage array vendors
and able to take advantage of the most
advanced Flash.
Do you see your company more
as a product developer than a
technology developer?
If you are just a technology developer that gets
say 10 cents per gigabyte, it’s very dificult to
build a good licensing business model. We are
deinitely focusing on complete products. We
will sometimes partner with other companies,
but we are not a licensing house. We produce
enterprise storage systems, which we are selling
directly to end user customers, channel and
OEMs. Our philosophy is a little bit different.
We believe that our core structure is so good
that both Skyera and OEMs can comfortably
make a living. We have a steadily growing OEM
business. With these other large companies,
if you try to argue that EMC or NetApp will
disappear in two years, it’s just nonsense. Instead
of going to futile “war” with other competitors,
we will appreciate them as customers, which is
way more productive and it helps everybody.
Philosophically, our company is focused on what
the customer wants. It cannot be OEM only
since we would be one step removed and not
directly in touch with customers to learn what
they want and that is key for our success. At
the same time, we are focusing on partnerships
rather than creating competitors.
Flash is the new storage media. If you want to use
this media, you have to have a semiconductor
background and you have to understand the
media. So we got the father of MLC NAND
Flash, Prof. Ken Takiuchi working with us, who
introduced MLC NAND Flash when he was a
designer at Toshiba. On top of that, we have
Frankie Roohparvar, who has more than 450
granted patents in NAND Flash design over the
last 19 years. He was the guy behind Micron and
Intel’s NAND Flash technology. We also have the
best core group of engineers from SandForce
working with talented teams from the storage
hardware and software space.
How does your product
compare to those efforts
other companies are
making in terms of data
rates and speeds?
“A solid-state array, such as Skyera’s skyHawk,
adds a comprehensive set of enterprise storage
services, including data deduplication and
compression, thin provisioning, Flash-optimized
RAID and storage QoS.”
I founded Skyera in 2012 and today a majority of
the company has an engineering background.
Skyera’s core competency is engineering and
the mixture is of semiconductor guys, hardware
designers, system designers, and software
engineers. The company is not funded by
venture capital, which is very unusual. At the
Because the volume of solid-
state drives was just 0.3% of
the enterprise storage market,
nobody could afford to build a
system around the Flash. What
do you do? You design a system
around SSDs—things that use the
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PULSE
“Skyera has the best Flash engineers and
designers in the industry and we developed
a fully integrated hardware and software
stack that provides 100x life ampliication
with this MAN Flash.”
same protocol as hard drives—and plug them into existing systems
because nobody had economic incentive to build around it.
Once the volume picked up, people started saying, “Twenty years
of hard drive industry legacy protocols, adding density, adding
latency—we are not extracting the full beneits from solid-state
media.” They started removing the protocols, which is why the
PCIe solution they have is in place. If you look at existing disk
storage systems, out of a $37 billion industry, internal storage is still
only $8 to $9 billion. The PCIe solution is still internal storage and
does nothing to address the needs of the majority of the market.
The third level of evolution is shared storage. The missing inal
stage of the evolution we are bringing is moving from solid-state
appliances to solid-state arrays. That’s an important distinction
that’s often overlooked. A solid-state appliance can connect to
servers, but it’s not developed for primary storage. A solid-state
array, such as Skyera’s skyHawk, adds a comprehensive set of
enterprise storage services, including data deduplication and
compression, thin provisioning, Flash-optimized RAID and storage
QoS. So the big difference is that PCIe Flash is targeted at a
small niche of the storage market, while Skyera is designing for
mainstream enterprise storage.
possible. This necessitated the use of the
Most Advanced NAND Flash—or MAN Flash
as we like to call it. The challenge then
was how to use MAN Flash and achieve
enterprise-class durability and reliability.
As I mentioned previously, Skyera has
the best Flash engineers and designers
in the industry and we developed a fully
integrated hardware and software stack
that provides 100x life ampliication with this
MAN Flash. This is achieved by minimizing
writes to the Flash, a new ultra-eficient
RAID technology designed speciically for
Flash that eliminates much of the legacy
disk-based RAID overhead, new DSP and
ECC technologies, and adaptive reads
and writes based on the condition of the
Flash media. The combination of these
life ampliication technologies produces
a 5-year or greater life expectancy for
Flash media in skyHawk, far beyond the
requirements for enterprise environments.
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I think lately, the main message our competitors try and spread is
that because we are using this most advanced Flash with fewer
programming cycles than what they claim to be using, they’re
trying to tell enterprise customers, “Are you sure you want that
latest generation Flash? It’s really not as reliable as what we’re
trying to sell you. And by the way, that’s why ours costs more.”
If you build the right system, then that variable is completely
removed from the equation and I think that is an important point.
Not surprisingly, those competitors aren’t telling you the whole
story. Skyera was founded to create a transformational solid-
state storage system: an enterprise, pure solid-state array at
the unprecedented cost of $3 per gigabyte. Reaching that
cost target with older generations of SLC or eMLC Flash wasn’t
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