Smart IOPS ready to address the high-end market

Smart IOPS, an emerging provider of SSDs, joined the recent IT Press Tour and delivered a very interesting session. The company was founded around late 2013, early 2014 and so far raised a bit less than $20 million from angels and friends with a plan to raise around $100 million in the next few months. 50 employees for the company so far. The team shows a pretty impressive background and track record. We even see Pradeep Sindhu, former CEO and founder of Juniper Networks and more recently CTO and founder of Fungible as investor but also Henri Richard, again, as advisor.

The company designs, develops and builds PCIe flash card in Gen 3 and 4 and NVMe SSD with the development of its own technology named TruRandom around Flash operating environment, with FTL, wear leveling, write amplification, error correction, storage and space placement and other data services such compression and encryption.

Addressing high demanding environments, the company targets databases, AI/ML, CDN in various industries such biotech, telecom, HPC, M&E and gaming with 2 flavors of product a high capacity and a high performance one. They already signed significant deals with China Telecom, TheTradeDesk and a few key others large corporations confirming that company targets large deals with some selected clients in the high-end enterprise and data center sectors.

The high performance one named Data Engine T2 HP delivers sustained 3M+ IOPS for 7.68TB max and the capacity one named Data Engine T2 HC offers 14GB of bandwidth for a capacity max of 72TB. The team has also products a Storage Class Memory product named Unobtanium FN with a 20us of latency for 6.4TB max. So far the company has shipped more than 1000 products for a capacity of 10PB+. The company has even developed SwitchStor, a 2U full flash NVMe appliance exposing NVMe/TCP. They uses nand chips from Kioxia and Samsung.

Smart IOPS has also started to design and develop a new generation product called the Smart IOPS Lambda to accelerated applications. It is positioned as a Functional Storage Device with a CXL Gen 5 connectivity with embedded nand chips for a total of 8TB, the Smart IOPS TruRandom controller and FPGA. The idea of this model is to offer an offload engine for selected applications.

TruRandom used in SSD, PCIe card and the FSD is designed to use as much as possible the PCIe bandwidth. For a PCIe Gen 4 with 8 lanes it means 16 Gbps x 8 lanes x 4kB block for a maximum theoretical throughput of 3.48M. Smart IOPS delivers almost the maximum with a sustained 3.4M IOPS which represents 98%.

Smart IOPS trajectory is ambitious with a plan to reach $125 million in 5 years being more aggressive than the T3D2 rule. We’ll follow carefully the company in the next few quarters.