Skyera, a flash appliance start-up, has been working for some time to amaze would-be flash users. The company takes advantage of the most advanced flash processes and non-SSD formats to squeeze as much flash as possible into a 1U cabinet.
Not content with the 44TB maximum of its original 1U skyHawk product (based on 19/20nm NAND chips from Micron and Toshiba) the company, at the Flash Memory Summit, introduced its new product, skyEagle, a system that provides up to 500TB of storage in the same 1U form factor based on Micron and Hynix 16nm NAND chips. Skyera boasts that it has multiplied the capacity of its systems by ten times over the course of a single year.
If that’s not enough, both systems offer compression and deduplication, which can take the capacity of the skyEagle up to 2.5 petabytes.
In comparison with HDD-based systems, Skyera says of its older skyHawk system: “Two petabytes of disk storage would normally require up to 12 or more racks to house the thousands of drives needed to attain this capacity. Equivalent capacity on skyHawk systems would require less than a rack.”
The company has also reduced its pricing from $3/GB down to $1.99/GB uncompressed, a number that it says comes to $0.49/GB when compression and deduplication are used.
Since there are scads of NAND chips inside there is speed in abundance, with the company claiming operation of 500 IOPS over 16 interchangeable 16Gb Fibre Channel or 10Gb Ethernet ports, with an option to add 96 PCIe lanes.
Shipments are scheduled to begin in the first half of 2014.
