who's who in SSD?


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Liqid

Liqid is redefining how resources are used and managed within the data center by offering its customers an innovative solution to keep pace with the rapidly-changing IT landscape in real-time.

see also:- Liqid's platform overview page

Who's who in SSD? - Liqid

by Zsolt Kerekes, editor StorageSearch.com

Liqid operates in the SSD software market.

From what the company has disclosed to date (Q2 2017) the company's SSD management technology is optimized for performance and is big SSD controller architecture. It intersects with SSD controller firmware (at the lowest drive level - such as solo SSDs), at the array of drives level (rack), and maybe at the fabric level too.

earlier comments:- September 2015:- Liqid has been emerging drip by drip from stealth mode in the past 2 quarters. So although we still don't know the definitive details - we can infer some details from several documents which the company has already published.

NVMe Protocol Impact on CPU Utilization (pdf) - August 2015 - provides some lab test results comparing an unnamed SATA SSD with a name NVMe SSD. Unsurprisingly NVMe wins in performance and "less CPU cycles are used for the same amount of data transfer". This is tantamount to null data - because we already knew that. But one useful thing it does tell us is that Liqid is definitely in the NVMe controller camp.

1 million IOPS - comparing NVMe and SATA SSDs (pdf) - September 2015 - shows that a single NVMe PCIe SSD (Kingston E1000 is the example used) can deliver the same IOPS as an array of 12 SATA SSDs (Kingston again) while achieving a latency which is 3x better.

These documents, coupled with the background of the founders (in significant SSD controller, SSD and memory companies), and the size of the seed investment, suggest to me that Liqid may be involved in the NVMe firmware or related controller design / adaptation IP market. Helping consumer SSD makers to define new product lines for the complex enterprise market.

DRAM (in 2016) has stayed stuck in the Y2K era of enterprise server latency and that's why its future will go the same way as the 15K hard drive.

latency loving reasons for fading out DRAM
in the virtual memory slider mix

Would users buy an SSD just because it has an animal in the logo or label? If so - what animal should it be?

animal brands in the SSD market

Liqid gets $10 million in Series A funding for PCIe fabric management platform

Editor:- May 10, 2017 - Liqid today announced it has secured $10 million in Series A funding led by Marker Hill Capital. Along with previous seed funding from Kingston Technology, Phison Electronics, ABR Capital Management and DH Capital, the company has now raised $20 million

Liqid named among fastest growing storage companies

Editor:- March 25, 2017 - Liqid was listed in a new article - 10 Fastest Growing Storage Companies 2017 - by Silicon Review .

In a related interview article Liqid 's CEO Jay Breakstone said...

"Liqids upcoming product release will be rack-scale solutions for composable infrastructure. The Liqid Composable Infrastructure frees data centers from form factor failures, allowing IT professionals to pool and scale resources instantly. Liqid recently demoed the CI solution, including Liqid management software, at the Open Compute Project U.S. Summit 2017 in Santa Clara, CA in early March 2017."

Liqid controller inside fastest 2.5" NVMe flash SSD

Editor:- August 9, 2016 - In a joint press release today Liqid and Kingston gave details of the "fastest 2.5" PCIe NVMe flash SSD ever benchmarked" - which they're showing this week at FMS.

upto 3.9 TB of capacity
Mixed R/W: ~ 5.5 GB/s (Full Duplex)
Seq read ~ 3.6 GB/s Seq write ~ 3.6 GB/s
mixed random R/W ~ 1.15 M IOPS (4 K, Full Duplex)

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using M.2 in server slots - article by Liqid

Editor:- January 30, 2016 - An article on the evolution of SSD form factors with reference to M.2 (pdf) - by Liqid - discusses how M.2 SSDs can be used in enterprise PCIe SSD environments which don't have native M.2 PCIe slots - by using add in carrier cards.

The image above (from Liqid's article) shows the evolution of SSD and HDD form factors in progressively smaller form factors from 1989 (5") to M.2 in 2014.

Although to be fair to the hard drive market the image doesn't show the smallest hard drives - such as the 0.85" hard drive from Toshiba (in January 2004) and 1" hard drive from Cornice (in August 2006).

The 1" HDD market didn't last long.

It was the first hard drive extinction event caused by adoption of flash SSDs. ...read the article (pdf)

Liqid gets seed funding for NVMe related IP?

Editor:- May 20, 2015 - Liqid today announced that it has secured $5.7 million in seed funding led by Kingston Technology, Phison Electronics, ABR Capital Management, and additional investments aggregated by DH Capital.

The financing round will be used to advance research and development as well as to help accelerate time to market.

See also:- VCs in SSDs

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