Skyera Shoehorns 500TB of Flash Capacity Into 1U Box

Skyera, an upstart all-NAND flash storage provider, has been making news lately. A year ago, the San Jose, Calif.-based storage hardware and software maker came out with a 1U skyHawk model that sported a whopping (at the time) 44TB all-flash capacity.

This year, at the recently completed Flash Memory Summit, Skyera launched its SkyEagle series of storage appliances, units which increase in a major way the capacity of those 2012 models. The new machines add a spate of new features, including active/active controllers for high availability, synchronous/asynchronous replication, protocols and fully converged networks—not to mention a lot more storage.

These new Skyera units contain an unprecedented half-petabyte—yes, 500TB—capacity in a 1u form factor. The company claims that this works out to more than 2.5PB of space after compression and deduplication is applied.

How is all this capacity possible? Well, some new 16nm flash chips from SK Hynix are part of the reason. Certainly the media itself is being improved upon all the time by the manufacturers, but the software in this case also is a major ingredient. It’s hard to believe how a controller could become any more optimized.

CEO Radoslav Danilak told eWEEK that Skyera accomplishes all this by utilizing super-high-density Most Advanced NAND (MAN) flash chips, combined with the company’s proprietary high-performance Flash controller and hardware accelerated services.

This is how Skyera has boosted the capacity and performance of SkyEagle by a factor of 10 over the market-leading SkyHawk array in a mere 12 months. In case you were wondering, Skyera has set a list price for the read-optimized 500TB SkyEagle storage system of $1.99 per gigabyte, or 49 cents per gigabyte with data-reduction technologies.

Skyera also recently announced a major partnership with Toshiba, inventor of NAND flash.

In this collaboration, Skyera and Toshiba will exchange technical and development information that will allow Skyera to use the enterprise-class architecture of Toshiba’s new second-generation advanced 19nm NAND Flash IT inside the SkyEagle storage arrays.