In March 2018 - Symbolic IO
changed its name to Formulus Black and
changed its business model to become a software only company - exiting from the
hardware supply business model.
Consistent with the earlier claims by
Symbolic IO - the restructured Formulus Black
says on its web site - "Our
patent-pending encoding method delivers massive gains in computing power and
efficiency. As a result, our software reduces the amount of RAM required for
computation, increasing compute speed by a factor of up to 10-20x in many
operations..."
Editor:- like its forebear Formulus Black may be at
the speartip of several important trends including:-
new
approaches to Memory Defined Software and new architectural approaches to
memory accelerated computing
(infinitely
faster RAM). | |
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|
Symbolic
IO, founded in 2012 and based in Holmdel, NJ, is the first computational
defined storage solution solely focused on advanced computational algorithmic
compute engine, which materializes and dematerializes data – effectively
becoming the fastest, most dense, portable and secure, media and hardware
agnostic – storage solution.
|
see also:-
Symbolic
IO - mentions on StorageSearch.com
after AFAs...
what's next?
where are we
heading with memory intensive systems?
what were
the big SSD memory architecture ideas in 2016?
controllernomics and
user risk ratios reward with big memory "flash as RAM" |
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| Who's who
in SSD? - Symbolic IO | |
by Zsolt Kerekes,
editor - StorageSearch.com
- October 24, 2016 |
Symbolic IO emerged from stealth in
May 2016.
From
the storage point of view the company's products can be viewed as being
aimed at the rackmount
SSD market but they also include necessarily compatible applications servers
too.
Although technology details have not been available at the time of
writing this Symbolic IO appears to be pushing technology boundaries in 2
related technologies:-
- SSD software:-
inasmuch as the entire product architecture is built on assumptions related to a
memory oriented architectures with clearly designated zones of latency,
capacity and compute. This is an architectural view of the datacenter which I
postulated would be compatible with a solid state storage view and which would
shape the computing market for the next decade in my 2012 article -
an introduction to
enterprise SSD silos.
In my view (and irrespective whether it ships
any products in a near term timeframe) Symbolic IO is one of the most
significant companies in the SSD market right now because it will change
expectations about the boundaries of what is possible in enterprise systems
architecture. |
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| memory intensive data
architecture emerges in a new family of latency roled boxes - unstealthed
by Symbolic IO |
Editor:- May 25, 2016 - 1 petabyte usable
storage in 2U along with a
flash backed RAM
rich server family which uses patented CPU level aware cache-centric data
reduction to deliver high compute performance are among the new offerings
unveiled
today by Symbolic IO which has
emerged from stealth mode.
Founder & CEO, Symbolic IO - Brian Ignomirello, said - "This
industry hasn't really innovated in more than 20 years, even the latest
offerings based on flash have limitations that cannot be overcome. Our goal at
Symbolic IO was to completely redefine and rethink the way computing
architectures work. We've completely changed how binary is handled and
reinvented the way it's processed, which goes way beyond the industry's current
excitement for hyper-conversion."
Giving a clue to
performance Ignomirello said - "One of our early tests, allows us to
run a full cable class content delivery network over 80+ nodes, while streaming
80+ full-featured movies simultaneously on one channel and requires less than 8%
of the CPU capacity and we had plenty of headroom to run more. IRIS
(Intensified RAM Intelligent Server) is 10,000 times faster than today's flash."
Editor's
comments:- I hadn't spoken with Symbolic IO (when I wrote this) but my
first impression was that the company is in line with at least 3 strategic
trends that you've been reading about on StorageSearch.com in recent years:-
Their
company profile summarizes their capability like this...
"Symbolic
IO is the first computational defined storage solution solely focused on
advanced computational algorithmic compute engine, which materializes and
dematerializes data effectively becoming the fastest, most dense, portable and
secure, media and hardware agnostic storage solution."
For more
about the company's background see this article -
Symbolic
IO Rewrites Rules For Storage on Information
Week.
From the marketing point of view it's interesting to see that
in its launch press release Symbolic IO positions itself in the
DIMM Wars
context in this way "IRIS... is 10 times faster than 3D XPoint."
Symbolic
IO says the new systems will be start to become generally available in late Q4
2016.
From an
enterprise
segmentation viewpoint the IRIS systems will be proprietary. There is space
for such approaches in the future market consolidation roadmap because not
everyone needs the fastest performance. But many
webscale SSD companies
are already using data reduction techniques for their own utilizations and
acceleration purposes.
The new thing - if there is a new thing - is
that Symbolic IO will make available boxes which incorporate modern data
architectures from a single source.
Although like all new systems
companies they'll have to wade their way through the apps accreditation and
compatibility lists before their revenues create any ripples - an adoption
dampening factor I wrote about in my 2013 article
Scary Skyera. | | |
. |
| One of the most potentially
most rewarding market challenges which SSD companies are grappling with right
now is - how to make enterprise solid state storage attractive to users who
aren't worried about their hard drive performance and don't even think they need
SSDs. |
| exciting new
directions in rackmount SSDs | | |
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"Thinking about this
from a high availability perspective - at the top level the fact that Symbolic
IO has designed an efficiently coded server which can replace many conventional
servers is itself a notable reliability gain.
And Symbolic IO (being
clever enough to solve the coding architecture tradeoffs) is surely clever
enough to have given deep thought to a SPOF mitigation architecture too. But as
Symbolic IO is still emerging from stealth mode we will just have to wait for
details." |
| Are there special risks and data
vulnerabilities in such compacted architectures? (which will need their own
solutions) - StorageSearch.com
opinion - February 2017 | | |
.. |
| Symbolic IO appoints CTO |
Editor:- July 12, 2016 -
Symbolic IO (which unveiled its
new memory intensive data architecture in
May 2016) today
announced
that Rob Peglar,
formerly VP, Advanced Storage at Micron has joined the
startup's executive team as Senior VP and CTO.
"What Symbolic IO
is doing, is quite frankly, the most innovative approach to stored data in 20
years, with huge implications on compute and how we architect systems in general
and distributed systems in particular, " said Peglar. "It's not every
day that a company comes along with a truly innovative and new technology. What
Symbolic IO is doing is a once-in-a-generation, breakthrough approach to the
problem of optimally storing and using data for efficient computation. Just like
all the major players got their start, we've created new category called
computational defined storage." | | |
.. |
| data dematerialization in
the DIMM? |
Editor:- July 27, 2016 - Some of the big SSD
ideas in recent years have been:-
One way to interpret the essence of Symbolic IO's architecture - which was
partially unveiled in May
2016 - may be as a coming together of the 2 concepts in the same place...
What
got me thinking this way was a recent blog -
a
look at Symbolic IO's patents - by Robin Harris on
his site - StorageMojo.com .
Symbolic IOs founder Brian Ignomirello who saw
and liked Robin's post - said among other things on
linkedinpulse
- "yes we (do) materialize and dematerialize data." ...read
the article
PS - In a conversation I had about the market
yesterday (which I'll write about next month) I noted how during the past year
the SSD industry has been thinking about
memory
systems architecture as the next emerging core for innovation in the same
kind of way that the market used to buzz about apps acceleration using SSDs on
the SAN and in servers (via
PCIe cards) 8 to 10
years earlier.
It's because of all that previous market experience with
PCIe SSDs in servers
especially and the comparisons with other ways of getting similar results with
arrays of SAS / SATA SSDs in storage - and the feel-good confidence from having
made those difficult changes - that the data computing market is now
receptive to being more ambitious with re-engineering memory.
The
business incentive being that the gap between what is possible and what is
being done every day with current products is so huge and
wasteful.
(Huge savings for users. Multi-billion dollar new markets for vendors.)
We've
already seen a lot of different approaches coming down the pipe in the past year
with technology announcements. But even though the implementation details are so
different - they're tackling the same problem.
With more toys in the
memory, SSD and software tool kit - there are now more permutations for
delivering applications
servers which exceed previous performance limits and slash away at legacy
cost assumptions.
The DNA of the semicondata market continues its
ruthless quest of doing more for less. | | |
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