ScaleFlux develops a better SSD

ScaleFlux, an emerging leader in computational storage (CS), joined The IT Press Tour last week. So far the company has raised close to $100 million according to JB Baker, VP marketing, almost the double Crunchbase announced on the company dedicated page. Investments came from essentially china plus Xilinx. Founded in 2014, the company has 260 employees today. But I was surprised to realize that the mission of he company has changed since its inception at least from my point of view. Today ScaleFlux wishes to build a better SSD.

The idea was to address the classic 3 dimensions: increased capacity, higher performance and lower overall cost. To achieve that ScaleFlux embeds some processing unit to offload the CPU, one of the effet is the endurance. Following what I wrote above, ScaleFlux mission has evolved from a CS dedicated to some applications with some offloads techniques to a more generic SSD.

This change reminds me what happened to Swarm64 who developed a card dedicated to PostgreSQL database offload processing. The adoption was very low even of the concept was attractive, probably too specialized. And this model invites to think about a very specialized offer with a narrow market and a more generic one for mainstream. For Swarm64, the story ended with an acquisition by ServiceNow. At the same time, we saw several development around DPU with Fungible or Nvidia for instance or approaches like Pliops.

The magic formula for ScaleFlux is to couple Enterprise NVMe SSD with an intelligent engine to deliver the 3 promises listed above. The company uses pretty small capacity 4 and 8TB with TLC Nand chips. The 16TB is planned for Q1 2023. Today the main feature is to deliver compression to solve the capacity challenge and thus improve the TCO. This compression is executed before writing to the SSD by the processing unit sitting the SSD with a 4k window.

Applications of such approaches are pretty large especially for databases, as table and records can be well compressed and thus projected good reduction ratio with 4:1 for MySQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB and 5:1 for Aerospike depending of the DB engine. And transactions per second are greatly boosted as well. This was achieved with the CSD-3000 series. The additional function is the encryption.

So far the company built 3 generations for products and the last generation is the 3000 series with the CSD 3000, capacity oriented, 4x and the NSD 3000, more than 2 times the endurance and the performance.

These products represents a real oem business opportunity and we have to recognize that the market starts to be crowded.

The company has started some tests with GRAID so 2 PCIe slots are occupied by these 2 cards confirming that the industry continues to create its own complexity.

ScaleFlux also signed a deal with Scale Computing who embeds its SSD into their edge HCI appliances.

We understand that the future generation will be Gen5 with some new form factors and more capacity options.

We continue to follow carefully ScaleFlux as some difficulties appeared for its direct competitor NGD Systems.