Based in Irvine,
California, NGD Systems, formerly known as NxGn Data, is focused on bringing a
new generation of intelligent SSD Solutions to market. With a vision of
delivering on the concept of "compute to storage" efficiently and cost
effectively, the company is building a converged platform that delivers both
enterprise SSD storage capabilities, and the added value of computational
functionality directly on stored data. NGD Systems was founded in 2013 by a
group of seasoned SSD industry veterans with more than 100 years of combined
industry experience. The company has been granted 14 patents in key areas of
SSD design, with an additional 13 patents filed. In their various roles at
companies like Western Digital, STEC and Memtech, the founders have helped drive
and shape the storage industry during this period of rapid growth and expansion.
The
company is led by Nader Salessi,
Founder & CEO, Vladimir Alves,
Co-Founder & CTO, and Richard Mataya,
Co-Founder & SVP SSD Solutions. These 3 veterans have over a decade in the
SSD industry working for such companies as
Western Digital,
STEC, and
Memtech in various
executive capacities and have helped drive and shape the industry during this
period of rapid growth and expansion. |
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| who's who in SSD? - NGD
Systems | |
Zsolt Kerekes,
editor and publisher - StorageSearch.com
- April 2018
NxGn Data made
its first appearance in the
Top SSD Companies List
in the Q1 2016
edition. NGD Systems rose to the top of the list #1 in Q4 2017, and
remained at #1 in Q1 2018.
The idea behind "in-situ SSD
processing" also goes by other names too. Examples being "Processing
In Memory", "Computational Memory" and "Computational RAM".
Although for historic and practical reasons some people might suggest
that an FPGA processor embedded in a DRAM array (Rambus-Xilinx /
Micron's Advanced
Computing Solutions, or a tensor processor embedded in a computational ASIC
(Google's TPU)
are different types of animals to a customizable controller in a flash array
(SSD). But I would argue they are simply different latency adjusted approaches
which solve similar problems.
One back story to these developments is
that big memory has been converging with flash as RAM as part of the trend
towards tiered memory and bigger memory in the same box (to reduce fabric
latencies which become significant even with 10GbE, PCIe and Gen-Z fabrics).
Flash as RAM (which came into market being as software products from
FlashSoft and others
initially leveraging PCIe
SSDs but then became form factor agnostic) delivers well understood cost
and performance benefits but also involves the tuning complexities of
controllernomics
and its enthusiastic adoption has created more demands for faster memory than
it can solve using dumb memory (however smartly tiered).
The market
experience of early
NVDIMMs and
SCM DIMM wars
makes it clear that other architectural uses of memory - such as those
mentioned above - along with software recognition of particular memory types "Memory Defined
Software" can provide orders of magnitude better application
acceleration when coupled with similar semiconductor assets compared to tiered
memory used with conventional processors - albeit these accelerators may be
heavily optimized for some applications and provide little or no benefits for
others.
In some ways these differences in design thinking are similar
to the SSD heresies
seen in earlier phases of the modern SSD era. Different permutations of IP
encapsulated by competing designers to solve similar problems.
military SSDs
the fastest SSDs
Can you
trust SSD market data?
are we
ready for infinitely faster RAM? |
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| NxGn Data exits stealth
with promise of in-situ SSD processing |
Editor:- July 29, 2014 -
NxGn Data today
exited stealth mode.
NxGn will use
advanced
adaptive DSP technology to enable small form factor SSDs (such as
M.2)
aimed at the enterprise market - using MLC and TLC down to 1z-nm geometries.
Fully functional FPGA-based samples will be available in early 2015,
followed by final production samples of SoC-based M.2 solutions in late 2015.
NxGn
says it will be the first SSD controller company in the industry with
in-storage computation capability - what it calls "In-Situ Processing".
Editor's
comments:- Earlier this year I published a couple of reports and mentions
about SSD suppliers (LSI
and Memblaze) who
have modifed their controller firmware to eliminate or bypass functions from the
lowest level SSD drive - for large customers like Baidu - who then use their
array level software to get better utilization and performance.
And in
the industrial
market InnoDisk - uses
what it calls 3rd generation architecture - to partition intelligent data
actions between the controller and software stack.
Until recently -
only Fusion-io (in
whose products the flash controller and apps server - share the same CPU cores)
has been able to maximize high end context intelligence with low level flash
block data access at a similar latency level.
But once you've solved
the problem of making SSDs reliable and fast - it's tempting to create an SSD
instruction set which which focuses on application layer needs too - and not
just those of dumb storage.
See also:-
Active
Flash: Towards Energy-Efficient, In-Situ Data Analytics on Extreme-Scale
Machines | | |
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"One way to interpret the new #1 company (NGD Systems) is as a
signal that the idea of
in-situ
SSD processing is close to moving into the mainstream."Zsolt Kerekes,
editor - StorageSearch.com
- re the Top SSD
Companies in Q4 2017 (January 19, 2018). |
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| After 2017 - memoryfication
solutions (tiering at the board, box and cloud level) will no longer be
restricted to the same old tunes restricted by the paucity of melodies
obtainable from DRAM, flash and the intervening interface dynamics. |
| adding new notes to the
music of memory tiering (Nov 2017) | | |
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| NxGn Data is now called NGD
Systems |
| Editor:- February 22, 2017 - NGD Systems (formerly
called NxGn Data) today
announced the
availability of a new product aimed at the
PCIe NVMe SSD market.
The Catalina SSD has 24TB of 3D TLC flash which the company says uses less
than 0.65 watts per terabyte. | | |
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| NSF funds project to
progress in-situ SSD processing |
Editor:- December 16, 2015 - NxGn Data today
announced it has been
awarded a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase 1
grant
(about $150K) from the National Science
Foundation.
"We've made great strides in developing our
fundamental SSD technology, with a working prototype (of in-situ SSD processing)
now running in our lab," said Nader Salessi,
CEO and founder of NxGn Data.
The grant application says - "This
project explores the Big Data paradigm shift where processing capability is
pushed as close to the data as possible. The in-situ processing technology
pushes this concept to the absolute limit, by putting the computational
capability directly into the storage itself and eliminating the need to move the
data to main memory before processing." | | |
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