Start-Up FlashGrid Launched Just Last Year

FlashGrid, Inc. was founded in 2015 by people originated from Russia in Sunnyvale, CA.

The two main executives are:

CEO and founder Alex Miroshnichenko was formerly chief architect at VMware for two years and previously founder and CTO of Virsto Software (acquired by VMware), CTO of Acronis and PowerFile, senior director advanced technology group at Veritas for 12 years, beginning his career as director engineering for QStar Technologies.

CTO Artem Danielov was solutions architect, PCIe flash storage, for Oracle Clusters at HGST (through Virident acquisition) during four years and, before that, at Intel for 7 years with the position of technical marketing/applications engineer, servers/storage/SSD.

FlashGrid open software turns both standard x86 servers (Dell, HPE, Supermicro) with NVMe PCIe SSDs into hyperconverged infrastructure, without RAID, for Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) and private database clouds. It provides a cost-efficient way to solving storage performance and scalability challenges in RAC environments.

FlashGrid Architecture Highlights:

Primary shared storage based on standard NVMe PCIe SSD add-in cards with 2.5-inch front-loading
Commodity NVMe SSDs available from server OEMs and flash memory vendors
Optional use of high-capacity SAS HDDs for bulk storage needs
Physical storage located inside the database nodes (converged nodes) or in separate storage nodes
Standard x86 servers used as database and storage nodes (0.4TB to 50TB per node)
Linear scalability of storage capacity and performance, from 2 to 100 nodes per cluster
Unlimited number of clusters
Zero interference between the clusters
Choice of converged (storage + compute) nodes or separate storage and compute nodes
Software managing SSDs and connectivity
Integrated with Oracle Automatic Storage Management(ASM) managing data, volumes, mirroring, snapshots
Each ASM instance able to access each of the SSDs in the cluster
2-way or 3-way mirroring of data across separate nodes
Distributed architecture with no single point of failure
Choice of 10/40/100GbE or Mellanox 56/100Gb IB/RDMA for network connectivity
FlashGrid Read-Local Technology minimizing network overhead by serving reads from local SSDs at the speed of PCIe
Software free to use but not the support

The solution only supports Oracle 11.2 et 12.1 databases under RHEL 7 or Oracle Linux 7, but also hypervisors Oracle VM 3.3 et VMware 5.5.x.

RAC database running on FlashGrid with twelve SSDs ($51,000 in total)
has almost 10X higher bandwidth than what an XtremIO flash array ($350,000) can provide.

FlashGrid architecture compared to flash storage array

* Based on $4,295 retail price of one Intel SSD DC P3700 2TB
** XtremIO performance
*** EMC prices