Start-Up Kazan Networks Emerged From Stealth Mode

Kazan Networks Corporation emerged from stealth mode and demonstrated NVMe over Fabrics technology in its booth at the Intel Developer Forum.

NVMe over Fabrics enables disaggregation of compute and storage
without sacrificing performance

This represents a milestone for Kazan, founded just 8 months ago but already showing a functional prototype of this pre-standard technology.

NVMe over Fabrics defines a new paradigm in high-performance flash connectivity with the potential to change how solid state storage is configured, accessed, and managed within the datacenter. By enabling flash to move out of the server chassis, this fast-growing storage tier can be pooled and shared, enabling new deployments not previously possible.

With its ultra low-latency solution, Kazan demonstrates that accessing flash remotely does not need to come a the expense of performance. By adding less than 500ns of latency through its ASIC, it expects to enable the highest performance solution available. Using this technology, storage system OEMs, storage appliance OEMs, and device vendors can add Fabric connectivity to any existing NVMe device.

“I’m extremely proud of the team and what we’ve been able to accomplish in less than a year,” said Joe Steinmetz, co-founder and CEO, Kazan. “With potentially the fastest and lowest-power solution available, we’re looking forward to strong market adoption of our technology in the very near future.”

Kazan’ accelerated, all-hardware implementation of the data paths through its ASIC represents a unique approach to an NVMe over Fabrics solution. By removing the need to run firmware on an embedded microprocessor, latencies through the ASIC’s main data paths are now measured in fractions of a microsecond, far faster than can be achieved by other System on a Chip approaches.

Kazan Networks is a privately-held start-up founded in December 2014 by storage networking veterans. The company is located in Auburn, CA, and is currently sharing details about their products to select customers.

KAZ’EN is derived from the ancient Samurai battle standard Fùrin Kazan, meaning “as swift as the wind, silent as the forest, fierce as fire and immovable as a mountain.”