Last year, Skyera released skyHawk, a product that blew the lid of flash storage which, at a price tag of $3 per a gigabyte, essentially made flash pricing comparable to traditional storage while offering magnitudes of improvement in speed and performance. This year, the company claims to have boosted that capacity and performance by 10 times while lowering the cost to $1.99 per gigabyte, and even as low as 49 cents when data deduplication techniques are applied.
The third generation in Skyera’s solid state platform, skyEagle offers flash storage at a price for $1 per gigabyte less than its previous release, while improving performance to an industry leading 5M IOPS, according to the company’s own claims. It adds over 2.5 petabytes after compression and deduplication. It leverages the high density of the Most Advanced 1y/1z NAND (MAN) flash chips together with its own high performing flash controller technology. The new platform features 16 interchangeable 16Gb Fibre Channel and 10Gb Ethernet ports and supports a mix of Fibre Channel and iSCSI block-based SAN protocols, plus 96 lanes of optional PCIe connectivity. It also supports NFS and CIFS.
The company claims installation can be done in as little as 10 minutes.
“Last year’s release of skyHawk offered higher performance at a price point much better than anyone close to us” Skyera’s CEO Radoslav Danilak told Red Herring. “This year, we’ve gone beyond that by an order of magnitude. We are changing how flash is working as well as how people work with Flash. We are offering customized commodity Flash at the same price as consumer storage with enterprise endurance and reliability.”
In addition to a consumer grade discount, Skyera’s customers also gain greater control over the system, Danilak contends. The data is routinely backed up at multiple ends, so that if any components fail, the system continues operating. “You can replace components while the system is still running,” Danilak said.
“Skyera is enabling smaller companies to have Facebook or Google type storage systems in the cloud by shrinking the density more than 100 times,” Danilak claimed. “It’s similar to the transition of bringing the mainframe to the personal computer. One rack of our systems gives you a very powerful data system. We can deliver big data to just about every customer.”
The company recently raised $51.6 million from Dell Ventures, WD Ventures, and several Tier 1 NAND Flash vendors. Though Danilak declined to state what last year’s generation did for the company’s base, he allowed that the company had delivered on its investors’ plan within 5 percent of accuracy. He anticipates similar results with the latest release.
Danilak expects future generations of Skyera’s platform to be “even crazier disruptions than generation three,” he said. “Interestingly, it was our customers who pushed us to this capacity. The market demanded, and our engineers worked around the clock to deliver it.”
While the company competes against data storage entities such as Pure Storage or Nimbus, it outdoes these players by an order of magnitude, explained Frankie Roohparvar, COO of Skyera.
“skyHawk’s introduction last year put us in a class by ourselves in regards to capacity and performance,” Roohparvar stated. “We felt that our only competition was us, and now we have disrupted ourselves not by a factor of 2 over 18 months in accordance with Moore’s law, but by over 10 times the performance and capacity in just 12 months.”