who's who in SSD? - Diablo Technologies


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Diablo Technologies - 2017

Founded in 2003, Diablo is successfully delivering products that enhance the performance and capability of memory system designs.

.....

Since 2010 - Diablo has been developing an SSD technology which the company calls Memory Channel Storage which leverages the disruptive capability of NAND-flash and future non-volatile memory technologies to enable increased levels of application performance supported by a new class of enterprise server and storage system designs.

The Diablo executive management team, now developing its 3rd family of memory interface solutions, has decades of experience in system architecture, chip-set design and software development at companies including Nortel Networks, Matrox Graphics, Goal Semiconductor, BroadTel Communications, ENQ Semiconductor, IceFyre Semiconductor, Mosaid Techologies and Huawei.

see also:- Diablo - mentions on StorageSearch.com,

(archived) Diablo's Memory Channel Storage page, Diablo's Memory1 page

SSD history

after AFAs... what's next?

latency loving reasons for fading out DRAM

where are we heading with memory intensive systems?

...

Editor:- Diablo is a pioneer in the SCM SSD DIMM wars market.

Where is Diablo relative to the Top SSD Companies which is researched and published by StorageSearch.com?

Diablo entered the list:- 2013 Q3

Diablo's highest position:- #1 in 2014 Q3. Diablo bumped Fusion-io off #1 and held the #1 slot for 4 consecutive quarters.

In Q3 2015 - Diablo relinquished the #1 slot to SanDisk.

who's who in SSD? - Diablo Technologies

by Zsolt Kerekes, editor - StorageSearch.com - May 2014

Diablo Technologies entered the enterprise SSD market in 2013 and made its first appearance in the Top SSD Companies list in Q3 2013.

Diablo's technology was described by StorageSearch.com as being the most significant new form factor for enterprise SSDs in that year.

More recently Diablo was ranked #16 in the Q1 2014 edition of the Top SSD Companies.

Diablo has created a new reference architecture for fast low latency flash memory based enterprise SSDs - which Diablo calls Memory Channel Storage.

StorageSearch.com calls this category of SSDs - which already includes many brands - memory channels SSDs.

Diablo's MCS SSDs fit into conventional DIMM sockets which were originally designed to accomodate DDR-3 DRAM.

Diablo positions MCS SSDs as a superior alternative competitor to fast low latency PCIe SSDs. That sounds like an elegantly simple marketing message - but the competing arguments for these technologies are more complicated. For details see - memory channel SSDs versus PCIe SSDs are these really different markets? (May 2014).

Unlike all leading PCIe SSD vendors - Diablo doesn't design and market complete SSDs.

Instead the first MCS SSDs - ULLtraDIMMs - came to market as a design collaboration with SMART Storage Systems - which was soon afterwards acquired by SanDisk.

The first major server maker to publicly adopt Diablo's MCS SSDs was IBM - which had worked with Diablo for years to shape the MCS architecture.

IBM's eXFlash DIMMs (as used in IBM's January 2014 server annoucements) are simply rebranded SanDisk ULLtraDIMM SSDs.

Diablo has been working with various SSD software ISVs to get support for their architecture as a platform in ways which are different to PCIe SSDs.

It seems reasonable to assume that that sometime in the future (after what I assume is a period of initial exclusivity with SanDisk) Diablo will license its interface and software technology to other memory and systems designers for use in alternative designs of SSD.

In future I would be surprised if Micron didn't also enter this market with low latency MCS style SSDs too.

In that case I think the most likely gating factor for that transition would be volume adoption - in servers - of the Hybrid Memory Cube form factor. That would enable Micron to combine more of its own memory IP rather than simply producing a design compatible with DDR-3 or DDR-4.

I don't think we've reached stability in reference enterprise SSD designs and use cases.

All the systems in the market today are implementations of transient architectures which are pragmatically adapting legacy installations and infrastructure.

what kind of SSD world can we expect in 2015?

Diablo - editor mentions from SSD market history

In November 2012 - Diablo Technologies announced it has closed a $28 million funding round which will help the company bring their Memory Channel Storage concept to market.

In March 2013 - Diablo Technologies announced it has closed an additional $7.5 million of funding, increasing the total equity investment of its most recent round to $36 million.

In April 2013 - Diablo Technologies named SMART Storage as its exclusive flash partner to pioneer a new type of (faster than PCIe SSD) memory channel SSDs.

In August 2013 - SMART Storage Systems announced it had begun sampling the first memory channel SSDs compatible with the interface and reference architecture created by Diablo Technologies.

In January 2014 - IBM launched its first servers - using eXFlash DIMMs - which is IBM's name for the flash SSDs designed by SanDisk which are based on the Memory Channel Storage architecture invented by Diablo. Read more in the article - It's IBM Jim - but not as we know it

Also in January 2014 - Netlist announced it had filed motions to add 2 additional patents to the lawsuits against the previously announced ULLtraDIMM memory module from Diablo Technologies and Smart Storage Systems.

In Augist 2014 - Diablo announced details of a new 2nd generation memory channel SSD - low latency flash SSD accelerators in DDR-4 sockets - which will sample in the first half of 2015.

In August 2015 - Diablo launched a new DIMM compatible platform called Memory1 designed to replace DRAM in big memory servers. Unlike Diablo's previous memory channel storage - the new Memory1 - which also used flash - was volatile and byte addressable. At the time of the launch StorageSearch.com said - "Memory1 is the most significant development in the enterprise flash market in the past 3 years (since the widespread impact of adaptive R/W and DSP controller technology) and the most significant development in the enterprise application server market in the past 8 years (since the launch of the first flash based PCIe SSDs by Fusion-io in September 2007)."

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don't all PCIe SSDs look pretty much the same?
Efficiency as internecine SSD competitive advantage

"Bottlenecks in the pure SSD datacenter will be much more serious than in the HDD world - because responding slowly will be equivalent to transaction failure."

will SSDs end my bottlenecks? - and cure all my server problems?

New to me in SSD - Diablo Technologies

Editor:- November 8, 2012 - every week I learn about new SSD companies and today one of them was Diablo Technologies - which is working a new high speed direct attach like memory nand flash (and maybe other nvm) SSD controller / product concept which it calls Memory Channel Storage.

Diablo today announced it has closed a $28 million funding round which will help the company bring their concept to market.

With this equity funding we are accelerating the completion of a memory channel-based solid-state storage platform that will deliver breakthroughs in system performance and flash storage density for analytic data processing, web-page serving, cloud computing and other server-based enterprise computing applications said Diablo's CEO and founder - Riccardo Badalone.

The management background is in chips (ASIC+FPGA), telecomms and DRAM memory. I haven't spoken to anyone in the company yet.

But if I had to make a wild guess it would be that Diablo's product may be something like Virident's or other PCIe SSD in architecture - but packaged more like Viking's DIMM compatible flash SSDs in form factor and connectivity.

...Later note:- "What Diablo is doing is effectively creating a new layer in the memory/storage hierarchy" said one of Diablo's investors Alex Benik in his blog today explaining why he likes the company. "Diablos MCS-based products will be dramatically higher capacity than DRAM, persistent, and deliver more IOPS at lower latencies than any other SSD technology."

Diablo discusses details of Memory Channel Storage

Editor:- July 30, 2013 - Diablo Technologies today did the public launch of its its new technology - Memory Channel Storage - which repurposes the interface and form factor of server DRAM into a new architecture for ultrafast flash SSDs which the company positions as a competitive alternative to very fast PCIe SSDs.

Editor's comments:- I spoke recently to Diablo's new VP of Marketing - Kevin Wagner about the company's new MCS.

I had already gleaned a heads up on the boundary capabilities and market potential of the new technology in an earlier interview with Diablo's flash partner SMART. So it was natural to ask how Diablo viewed the impending acquisition of SMART by SanDisk?

Not surprisingly Kevin indicated that whereas Diablo already thought it had made the best choice before - the upside potential of having SanDisk as a partner for this memory technology made it 10x better.

Here's what I learned.

Diablo's TeraDIMMs are designed to fit standard sockets designed for DDR-3. They are electrically, form factor and power compatible. But instead of RAM - a typical TeraDIMM using today's technology might have 400GB of flash.

Diablo's controller architecture means that the host CPU can read and write from memory in the same transparent way as it would talk to RAM.

TeraDIMMs can be installed in every set of slots where you'd normally insert RAM. The only limiting factor in the current architecture is that at least one pair of slots has to be RAM. All the rest can be flash.

Diablo claims that MCS has better write latency than most PCIe SSDs.

Specifically MCS has a write latency of 3 to 5 microseconds. This is really a write to the controller.

TeraDIMMs have a skinny flash cache architecture - which means that apart from a small amount of register memory in the MCS controller itself - no RAM is used in the SSD. The MCS design includes power fail hold up capacitors which guarantee that all data which has been written to the TeraDIMM gets completely saved to flash.

From the applications point of view MCS looks like a massive amount of persistent RAM - but with terabytes rather than tens of gigabytes of memory space and with a cost structure closer to the market price of flash than DRAM.

Is it bootable? No. Not yet that wasn't regarded as a priority.

Although the product is not yet available - Kevin Wagner told me that Diablo has been getting a lot of interest from server companies. Diablo has been validating software with their ASIC based implementation for several months following good earlier characterizations of the design with FPGA. From the software point of view Diablo's aim was to prioritize a usable design which would work for the market as soon as possible. Obviously many possibilities for leveraging the basic technology spring to mind. I asked for example about preferred models of high availability?

Kevin said that so many companies are interested in what they're doing that they don't have enough resources to talk to them all right now. It won't be long before the company publishes more details of its reference architecture - and conversations have already begun with ISVs and other companies which could be the seeds of a new ecosystem.

But the current design has been designed to work in virtualized and non-virtualized environments and the company has got already got a good idea of how headline big data apps would perform in benchmarks using their technology.

I raised the question of inter-operability with PCIe SSDs (in the same MCS resident servers) and it looks like the guesses I had made about segmentation and collaboration and competition with other SSD types which I've already written about in my earlier article about memory channel SSDs - are still valid. So I won't repeat those points here.

We still have to wait for firm product pricing and configuration details. But if you had any doubts about where the money will be inside servers - MCS provides another new way of packing even more flash SSD capacity in.

more money for Diablo

Editor:- March 19, 2013 - It's not unusual in the current SSD market for some companies to have oversubscribed investor funding rounds - and that was the case recently with Diablo Technologies which today announced it has closed an additional $7.5 million of funding, increasing the total equity investment of its most recent round to $36 million. USVP joins previously announced investors.

Editor's comments:- Diablo describes its product as being these categories:- "soon-to-be-announced" and "disruptive".

If you're already interested in PCIe SSDs, InfiniBand or SSDs in RAM module form factors (but which unlike the flash DIMMs from memory makers - might actually emerge from stealth mode attached with a software model) then what Diablo does do with its Memory Channel Storage may impact some of your future long range plans.

Like you - I'm guessing of course. Diablo hasn't ordered any SSD ads yet - although that $7.5 million would come in handy.

Diablo names SMART Storage as exclusive flash partner to pioneer memory channel SSDs

Editor:- April 25, 2013 - You may remember reading here before about a company called Diablo Technologies - which while in stealth mode - hinted it was working on a new technology which would enable SSDs to run on server motherboards with latency and throughput even better than PCIe SSDs....

Diablo has been creating the interface side of things - but I learned recently that implementing the flash side of this - in a manner which is both effective and affordable - requires a world leading mastery of enterprise flash IP - which Diablo wisely recognized it doesn't have.

So today Diablo has publicly announced an exclusive partnership agreement with SMART Storage Systems which will leverage its flash IP and controller assets to co-design a new family of ultra-low latency SSDs and system accelerators which connect via Diablo's memory channel storage architecture and which will be sold exclusively by SMART but jointly supported by both companies.

Editor's comments:- there are a lot of implications for the future direction of SSD server acceleration if this collaboration succeeds in delivering competitively attractive new types of SSDs. But there are also very difficult technical problems and ecosystems development problems to solve too in order to make it viable.

I discussed these topics in a conversation earlier this week with John Scaramuzzo, President and Esther Spanjer, Director SSD Marketing at SMART.

Among the many questions inspired by that conversation:-

how is the new technology different to what has been done before? - particularly with PCIe SSDs and with DIMM class flash?

if successful - what impact would memory channel SSDs have on the PCIe SSD market? - and application server architecture?

how will the new types of SSDs stretch the demands of flash endurance and latency?

how will competitors respond to this new technology? And how much of what they say should you take take on board or disregard?

who are going to be the among the first wave of customers to adopt these new SSD?

when will the first products be ready?

I've written about these matters and more in a new home page blog on StorageSearch.com - Memory Channel Storage SSDs - will the new ultra low latency SSD concept fly? - should you book a seat yet?

Diablo sets up advisory team for new SSD interface

"As we prepare to launch our line of Memory Channel Storage products that enable next-generation enterprise server and storage system designs, we have set our sights on unprecedented levels of performance for current and future applications To that end, we have assembled a group of top industry innovators to help refine the development of our revolutionary NAND-flash system solutions...

Maher Amer, CTO Diablo Technologies - SSD news -
January 29, 2013

"The winners in SSD software could be as important for infrastructure as Microsoft was for PCs, or Oracle was for databases, or Google was for search."

get ready for a new world in which
all enterprise data touches SSDs

memory channel SSD vs PCIe SSD write latency - initial 3rd party benchmarks

Editor:- November 7, 2013 - Although it's possible to make estimates of how a new type of SSD interface will perform compared to what already exists - the interplay of applications software, systems software and a new controller design - means that initial assumptions can easily be out by a factor of x2.

And even if you have accurately guessed what the weak points and the strong points are in the product's performance symmetries - it's only when you start to see benchmark results that you can have more confidence in your models of what's happening inside.

So if you've been wondering how Diablo's memory channel storage compares with PCIe SSDs - click here to a new whitepaper (pdf) which includes some useful data. The application isn't important but it's the first public glimpse which goes usefully beyond the graphs shown in the product launch documents.

The highlight for me is - a mean write latency of about 30S for MCS compared to about 100S for PCIe SSD- at a particular R/W ratio which may of course look nothing like your own setups.

latency MCS vs PCIe SSD - click to read more

When you stop and think about it - we might see just as large a difference between different models of PCIe SSDs - and as we don't know the identity of the mysterious "PCIe SSD" in this paper - and as we've only got a very limited view of the comparison - you might say this whole paper is null data.

On the other hand - being able to show that in one situation an MCS SSD can be 3x faster than a hypothetical PCIe SSD - suggests that the new MCS SSDs aren't slouches either.

My best guess back in April 2013 was that there would be no material performance difference between an MCS SSD and a best of breed PCIe SSD - when working with best of breed VM optimized software APIs.

I think the differences between memory channel and PCIe for server SSDs shouldn't be seen simply as performance differences (which may indeed not be that significant) but as different integration approaches which offer a different set of branching out directions depending on the software environment and the high availability framework. The 2 types can even work together in the same server in different roles.

...

in memoriam Diablo

Editor:- December 15, 2017 - Diablo Technologies has filed for bankruptcy. More details can be seen in - Ottawa-based Diablo Technologies files for bankruptcy - in the Ottawa Business Journal.

There had been earlier signs that the company had ceased operations.

A story in the Register - Lights out at Diablo as plug pulled on website - noted a series of key personnel departures and a recent statement by the company's legal counsel consistent with the white space now on the company's home page and Diablo's non appearance at FMS in August.

Editor's comments:- Here's what I said today to a reader who asked my views about the fading away of Diablo Technologies.

My interpretation of Memory1 benchmarks (some of which were done by Diablo's own customers) is that with some workloads you would get substantial performance benefits (compared to assembling the same memory size with multiple DRAM based servers). But – it was clear – even in Diablo's own published benchmarks that with small data sets the performance was slightly worse (than without Memory1). So as a user you had to be very clear to size the system in an appropriate way. And clever enough to do it.

But more critically to the business case - I think investors must have thought that if the company can't make buckets of money at a time of memory shortage and high raw DRAM prices – then there would never be a better opportunity.

Competitor Netlist had shrewdly insulated itself from the cost of the next round of legal battles. And the years of uncertainty in the earlier rounds must have deterred many design wins.

The memoryfication market – with tiered enterprise memory – now has so many competitors and so many form factors that no one can be guaranteed to get a sizable chunk of it with any single product. It's really a fragmented market in which there are many ways to get similar results using entirely different mixes of technology at the server, box and infrastructure levels. Sad outcome really.

Diablo's Memory1 was a bold offering. And the industry is better for having been pushed towards considering memory tiering at the sub microsecond level and the attendant needs of software stacks and hardware - sooner - because of Diablo's efforts than it might otherwise have done.

One way to interpret the ill preparedness and rush to hype of Intel/Micron's unready Optane (née 3DXpoint) in 2015 was as a panic response to the outbreak of DIMM wars flashed over by rumors of Diablo's Memory1.

See also:- Memory Channel Storage SSDs - 2013 to 2017

Seen above - a banner ad by Diablo which started running here on StorageSearch.com in December 2016. Diablo's web site was taken down when the company filed for bankruptcy in December 2017 but if you click on the image it will take you to an archived version of the Memory1 product page.

Nowadays you can't expect to understand the worldwide SSD market and realistically predict the likely source and direction of strong influences without having some cognizance of the SSD market in China.

who's who in the SSD market in China?

Diablo is 1 of 4 companies shining the way ahead for the entire memory storage data systems market.

1 big market lesson and 4 shining technology companies

How can a regular DWPD flash SSD play at being DRAM in a DIMM?

SSD controller aspects of Diablo's Memory1 and DMX

The SSD market is moving into a new phase at the core of which is changed thinking about the role of memory and storage and software.

where are we heading with memory intensive systems?

"Memory1... if you want it - you can have it.
The phoney war phase of SSD SCM DIMM wars
has now ended."

Zsolt Kerekes, editor - StorageSearch.com commenting on volume availability of Diablo's Memory1 128GB DDR4 module in SSD news (July 20, 2016).

placing 3D XPoint claims in context

Editor:- June 23, 2016 - If you've been trying to renconcile Intel / Micron competitive claims about 3D XPoint compared to flash and DRAM - it has been problematic due to absence of adequate hard data.

A new video - 3D XPoint, reality, opportunity, competition - by Sang Yung Lee, President & CEO - BeSang - places the known features of 3D XPoint into context, and looks at the limitations, manufacturing costs and best likely application roles for this new technology.

If you're interested in analyzing the impact of DIMM wars in your future plans - then the 12 minutes you spend listening to the narrative in this video will remove any mysteries of how the IM technologies could fit into the pattern of adoption and just as important - you'll see where 3D XPoint is unlikely to be the best fit technology too. ...watch the video

more funding and a new CEO for Diablo


	VCs in SSDs

editor:- January 12, 2016 - Diablo Technologies today announced it has secured an additional $19 million in Series C funding - which will be used to further accelerate customer deployments via expansion of sales, applications support and R&D.

In addition, the company announced that industry veteran Mark Stibitz will serve as the company's Chairman and CEO. He brings extensive business management, global market, and product development experience from across start-up and public companies including Anobit, Elliptic Technologies, PMC-Sierra, Agere Systems and Lucent/AT&T-Microelectronics.

Diablo's co-founder and previous CEO, Riccardo Badalone, has been appointed the technology-centric and customer-facing role of Chief Product Officer.

Editor's comments:- Diablo needed a corporate adrenaline shot.

While the company last year had accustomed its pace to the slow lane timetable of judges and courts - competitors from many different quarters fired up their own alternative smoke and mirrors DIMM war flags of convenience. This has diverted attention away from Diablo which no longer has the sheen and lure of first mover advantage.

Diablo's Memory1 was among technologies mentioned in StorageSearch.com's annual market roundup

what were the big SSD ideas in 2015?

...

"Memory1 is the most significant development in the enterprise flash market in the past 3 years (since the widespread impact of adaptive R/W and DSP controller technology) and Memory1 is the most significant development in the enterprise application server market in the past 8 years (since the launch of the first flash based PCIe SSDs by Fusion-io in September 2007)."

Zsolt Kerekes, editor - StorageSearch.com

In the blog - how significant is Diablo's Memory1 for the enterprise data ecosystem? (August 2015)

See also:-

If PCIe SSDs cost nothing - would there still be a market for memory channel SSDs?

Yes - see the analysis in - memory channel SSDs versus PCIe SSDs (another slight return)

...

Diablo's roadmap back on track following jury verdict

Editor:- March 25, 2015 - Diablo today announced it has won a "decisive victory" in its critical court battle with Netlist.

The jury unanimously concluded that there was no breach of contract and that there was no misuse of trade secrets. Further, the jury confirmed Diablo's sole ownership and inventorship of the "917 patent."

"We are extremely pleased with the jury's verdict today," said Riccardo Badalone, CEO and Co-Founder of Diablo Technologies. "We look forward to getting back to serving our customers and delivering on our exciting Memory Channel Storage roadmap."

Editor's comments:- Diablo replaced Fusion-io as the #1 most searched SSD company by the readers StorageSearch.com in Q3 and Q4 2014 - because you all know a disruptive SSD technology platform when you see it.

The long running legal tangles got to the point where Diablo was prevented by an injunction from making more products - pending a trial outcome. This verdict means the enterprise application acceleration industry can resume its onwards progress by being able to count on the availability of a significantly different flash latency asset and software platform for deployments inside the server box.

...

Diablo appeals shipment injunction - says court was misled

Editor:- January 14, 2015 - Diablo Technologies today announced that it has appealed the court ruling (reported earlier this week - and initiated by Netlist) which had granted a preliminary injunction to halt Diablo's shipments of Memory Channel Storage based chipsets.

Diablo's appeal explains that the ruling is based on an erroneous interpretation of the contract and a failure to recognize the technology differences among the products involved.

Most importantly, however, the court did not find that Diablo MCS uses Netlist trade secrets.

Diablo says - to support the judgment, the order effectively rewrites the language in the contract signed by the parties in 2008: the additional words included in the order changed the terms of the contract significantly and imposed a new obligation that was not agreed between the parties. In other words, there was no violation by Diablo of the original contract. The court was misled about important technology distinctions:

The court relied on Netlist's representation that their HyperCloud and Diablo MCS "are used to perform the same function" which is not the case because the HyperCloud is DRAM (memory) and Diablo MCS is a block storage device (disk).

The court also relied on Netlist's representation that the products are competitive because they both "attach to the same memory channel."

Diablo also says "Netlist equates the 2 devices simply because they use the same location and i/o channel; extending that logic would equate all devices that reside in PCIe slots, which would be a similarly erroneous claim."

"It is important that the facts of the case are well understood; it should also be stressed that the court did not determine that Diablo uses Netlist trade secrets," stated Riccardo Badalone, CEO and co-founder of Diablo Technologies. "We offer an innovative storage device that gives customers great performance advantages, but with this injunction, the court is putting our company and our customers at risk. With this appeal, we expect to reverse this decision and get back to work."

Editor's comments:- are Netlist's products functionally different to those using Diablo's architecture?

Yes! The differences are so great that the 2 products are listed in different directories here on StorageSearch.com

Memory Channel Storage SSDs - which encompasses low latency, fast flash SSDs which plug into DIMM sockets and transfer data via interfaces which were originally designed for DRAM.

hybrid DIMMs, NV DIMMs, flash backed DRAM DIMMs - which includes DRAM modules which automatically save their contents when electrical power drops to an integrated non volatile memory from which the data is reloaded after normal power is restored.

The fact that standards organizations and some vendors have historically used the term "flash DIMM" in the context of both types of products - has contributed to industry confusion.

But the term - flash DIMM - is a description of the physical form factor - and tells you nothing about the operation and functionality of the device from a data architecture point of view.

The differences are vast and immediately obvious to anyone who's technical. But I was wondering how would I explain the gulf of difference to someone who doesn't know anything about computer design.

My analogy goes like this... Suppose someone offered you the choice of 2 types of backpack when you started a balloon ride.

One is a parachute, the other is a jetpack.

They both perform different functions - although - until you activate their functions they both might look the same.

OK I know you need a higher skillset to operate the jetpack.

And you also need a much more developed SSD software support ecosystem to deploy memory channel SSDs too.

Diablo countersues Netlist

Editor:- September 25, 2014 - Diablo announced today that is has filed a lawsuit against Netlist for unfair business practices that violate Diablos IP rights.

This appears to be a countermeasure to 2 earlier lawsuits initiated by Netlist against Diablo - which were widely reported by the SSD related press in January 2014.

Today - Diablo reiterates that its Memory Channel Storage (DDR3/4 form factor and interface compatible flash SSD) is a new and innovative architecture that neither infringes upon, nor misappropriates any Netlist IP rights. And Diablo argues that its MCS-based products and the Netlist HyperCloud DIMM (high density DRAM) - which were the cited products in Netlist's earlier legal moves - are designed to serve different purposes and are not interchangeable.

Diablo says the contract between the 2 companies (which have been mentioned in the press) clearly assigns legal ownership of the implementation IP in the HyperCloud chipset to Diablo. As a result, Diablo is seeking damages for breach of contract for Netlists attempt to usurp the companys IP rights.

We have been very patient throughout this entire process and it is now time for us to share our side of the story" said Riccardo Badalone, CEO and Co-founder of Diablo Technologies. "We will demonstrate definitively that products based on the Memory Channel Storage architecture do not use any Netlist IP.

...

Diablo unveils DDR-4 flash DIMM SSDs

Editor:- August 7, 2014 - Diablo yesterday announced details of a new 2nd generation memory channel SSD - low latency flash SSD accelerators in DDR-4 sockets - which will sample to oems in the first half of 2015.

Along with the new hardware technology there will be an improved software platform - with features like NanoCommit - which Diable says will enable hundreds of millions of transactions per second, with nanosecond latency.

"Memory Channel Storage DDR4 solutions represent the next evolution of Server Acceleration technology," said Riccardo Badalone, CEO and Co-founder of Diablo Technologies. "In addition to supporting a faster memory interface, the Carbon2 platform delivers unprecedented levels of hardware acceleration for new software innovations like NanoCommit. Converged Memory, where the best of Flash and DRAM are combined, will rely on this type of technology to give applications the ability to transparently persist updates to main memory."

Editor's comments:- After FMS - Diablo sent me more info (pdf) about their FMS presentation (pdf) from which I have extracted these key features.

Diablo's converged memory architecture (flash tiered with DRAM) is planned to support 700 million random cachelines / sec.

Latency of each cacheline is about 48 nanoseconds.

Diablo's NanoCommit supports byte addressable small writes to flash with high transaction rates and the ability to mirror the DRAM contents to persistent storage.

The combination of technologies would enable something like a 1U server with 25TB of converged memory.

Diablo secures patent related to MCS technologies

Editor:- July 31, 2014 - Diablo today announced that the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) awarded U.S. patent No. 8,713,379, entitled a System and method of interfacing co-processors and input/output devices via a main memory system, to the company. The 379 patent describes:

A method for connecting non-volatile memory directly to the memory controllers of a processor.

A learning machine to handle data interleaving/de-interleaving and data scrambling/de-scrambling algorithms for DDR3/4-based memory controllers.

A method to remap the non-linear DIMM address space back to linear address space used by the driver

...

new whitepaper from Diablo looks at
"drawbacks of traditional PCIe SSDs"

Editor:- April 22, 2014 - Diablo Technologies today published a white paper Enterprise Storage Performance: it's all about the Architecture (and not just the interface) (pdf)

This paper presents Diablo's perspective - as the creator of Memory Channel Storage and looks at the measured performance weaknesses of some specific (but unnamed) PCIe SSDs with respect to their measured performance asymmetries under various loads and then attempts to generalize those weaknesses as part of an argument that MCS is a better solution than PCIe SSDs - because MCS is more scalabe and doesn't suffer from the same kind of architectural bottlenecks.

Editor's comments:- Does the performance data in this paper demonstrate that one model of fast SSD can be faster or operate more consistently than another?

Yes. (If you choose both the benchmark and the configuration - and number of SSD controllers in the mix.)

But it doesn't prove the general proposition that MCS SSDs are better than PCIe SSDs.

For many years - competing PCIe SSD makers used to publicize similar comparisons between their products and those of PCIe SSD competitors. (And before its acquisition last year - Virident became a grand master at publishing this kind of benchmark.)

So while I am convinced of the benefits of Diablo's MCS architecture - and what it can do differently and better compared to PCIe SSDs - I think this particular paper isn't the best evidence for their case.

related articles

...

Is an ULLtraDIMM fitted? - Add 4.

what's in a number? - introducing SSDserver rank

...

Diablo comments on legal barbs cast by Netlist

Editor:- February 14, 2014 - Diablo's CEO and founder - Riccardo Badalone was reported to have said in an interview blog by Willem ter Harmsel today - re the lawsuit launched againts them by Netlist...

"They (Netlist) basically have yet to prove that:- they understand the product, and also that they have found anything Diablo is actually infringing on. We are just going to let this run through the (legal) process and we are confident about the outcome." ...read the article

IBM launches first memory channel SSD servers

Editor:- January 16, 2014 - IBM today disclosed preliminary test results comparing the latency of memory channel SSDs to PCIe SSDs - in the launch press release of its new X6 architecture for X86 servers.

IBM said - "Our evaluators are seeing 5-10 microseconds write latency for eXFlash DIMMs in preliminary testing vs. 15-19 microseconds latency for PCIe-based flash storage from Fusion-io, Micron, and Virident, and 65 microseconds latency for Intel S3500 and S3700 SSDs."