New blood in storage with Symbolic IO

Symbolic IO (www.symbolicio.com), founded in 2012 by Brian Ignomirello, former CTO of HP global storage team, is now out of stealth. The company claims to be the first computational defined storage solution. The company introduces IRIS, for Intensified RAM Intelligent Server, with the goal to be media-agnostic and data driven. IRIS is delivered via 3 flavors: IRIS Compute, IRIS Vault and IRIS Store available as 2U units powered by Intel cpus.
The team has built a radical new approach for storing data able to reduce the storage footprint in a great amplitude promoting a super dense 2U and be super fast working with RAM with non volatile entities. When we mean super dense storage, we didn't imagine that 1PB can be stored in just 2U. Without telling us exactly how it works, of course, Symbolic IO is about a new way to provide Data Virtualization with what the company says a "materializing" and "dematerializing" data in real-time, living in memory without any reality on storage.
In term of performance, Brian Ignomirello claims that IRIS is 10x faster than 3D XPoint and 10,000x faster than NAND flash. Wow, impressive and probably unbeatable at the time of the product release in Q4 2016. The company has worked super hard to develop OS, ASIC and algorithms for 4 years to reach that super level of performance. The product should appear on the market before the end of the year and will start at $80,000. From what we know today, IRIS is pretty unique and it deserves a look and test, no doubt. Symbolic IO would be a perfect candidate for a future edition of The IT Press Tour.