Skyera Unveils skyEagle 1st 16nm All-Flash Storage Arrays – Flash Memory Summit 2013 Update

Skyera Incorporated has announced the skyEagle™ Series, the first all-flash enterprise storage arrays with the reliability, performance and capacity to handle mission critical data center applications below the price per gigabyte of legacy disk-based arrays.

Based on Skyera’s third-generation solid-state platform, the skyEagle series builds on the breakthrough innovations introduced last year in the skyHawk™ array, adding active/active high availability, synchronous/asynchronous replication, fully converged networks, protocols, and storage, and an unprecedented half petabyte (500 terabytes) capacity in a 1u form factor –more than 2.5 Petabytes after compression and deduplication.

By leveraging the high density of the Most Advanced 1y/1z NAND (MAN) flash chips operating on their true 16nm process, combined with its proprietary high-performance flash controller and hardware accelerated services, Skyera has boosted the capacity and performance of skyEagle by a factor of 10 over the market-leading skyHawk array in just one year, to 5 million IOPS. Skyera has also set a list price for the read-optimized half petabyte skyEagle storage system of $1.99 per GB, or $.49 per GB with data reduction technologies.

The skyEagle series offers 16 interchangeable 16Gb Fibre Channel and 10Gb Ethernet ports supporting a mix of Fibre Channel and iSCSI block-based SAN protocols, as well as an option for 96 lanes of PCIe connectivity. Support for NFS and SMB makes skyEagle a truly converged enterprise storage solution.

“Big data and analytics; public, private and hybrid cloud infrastructures; and virtualized environments demand highly-available storage but that is only one piece of the storage infrastructure,” said Radoslav Danilak, CEO of Skyera. “With the introduction of skyEagle, Skyera has created a next-generation all-flash platform with an optimal balance of storage availability, usable flash capacity performance and enterprise-class durability.”

“skyHawk’s introduction last year put us in a class by ourselves in regards to capacity and performance,” said Frankie Roohparvar, COO of Skyera. “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.”

Skyera’s innovations in flash controller design and adaptive read-write techniques make the company the only enterprise flash array supplier capable of utilizing MAN flash chips, bringing a huge capacity boost to skyEagle without the penalties commonly associated with these chips. As NAND flash geometries shrink below 20nm with the newest products, the durability and performance of the media are reduced below the standards demanded for enterprise data center environments.

However, Skyera’s 100x life amplification technology eliminates those issues. In addition, Skyera is working closely with the top flash vendors to tune the performance and durability characteristics of the MLC media so that media is optimized for the skyEagle platform. The result is that Skyera is able to leverage the economy of MAN flash with unprecedented capacity while producing enterprise-class durability and performance at a price point that is moving below hard-disk based systems.