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NVMe over Ethernet startup flashes 'system' as it preps for decloak

Pavilion Data Systems slowly doffing kimono

An NVMe over Ethernet storage startup is slowly emerging from stealth, exhibiting a system in Seagate’s booth at the Flash Memory Summit in Santa Clara, August 8-11.

This startup, Pavilion Data Systems, says it is innovating at the intersection of storage, memory and networking so as to offer breakthrough performance and usability for traditional and new age applications. It can, it hopes, deliver large amounts of fast IOs, with hyper-scale data centres and separated compute and storage resources in mind.

This semiconductor-related startup was founded in San Jose in 2014 with initial funding from a convertible note issued by SKTA Innopartners. The founders were CEO Kiran Malwankar and software engineering VP Sundar Kanthadai. Malwankar is an ex-director of hardware engineering at Violin Memory, with stints at Andiamo, Cisco and Nishan Systems in his CV.

Pavilion says it is a well-funded startup. There was an A-round for a $15m, with Artiman Ventures and Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers. AT the time Malwankar said: “I’m ecstatic to immediately grow our core team and accelerate toward a successful product launch.”

Other executives include CTO VR Satish, and product management head Jeff Sosa, who came from Western Digital via HGST and Virident. He’s a flash guy. Satish has spent time as a VP and CTO in Symantec’s storage and availability group. Pavilion employs both software and hardware engineers.

Malwankar has a patent – Processor agnostic data storage in a PCIe-based shared storage environment – which talks about an interface device between accessing servers, which have PCIe-based adapter circuits, and a storage array, with PCIe switching involved at the array end of a network link between the accessing host and the storage array.

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Malwankar patent diagram.

This patent was assigned to Malwankar and Kiron Balkrishna of Pavilion Data Systems in Sunnyvale in January 2012, two years before the firm is said to have been founded.

Malwankar, Balkrishna and others have applied for a patent, 20160127492 entitled “Non-Volatile Memory Express over Ethernet,” and the abstract reads:

A processing device receives a message encapsulating an input/output (I/O) command from a remote computing device. The processing device identifies one or more physical storage devices to be accessed to satisfy the I/O command. The processing device then sends, to each physical storage device of the one or more physical storage devices, one or more non-volatile memory express (NVMe) commands directed to that physical storage device.
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Patent app 20160127492 diagram

Add Pavilion Data Systems to the roster of NVMe over fabrics suppliers and startups; EMC's DSSD, E8, Excelero and Mangstor, with Kaminario and Tegile approving NVMeF technology as well. It's beginning to get busy in the NVMe fabric fast lane.®

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