Start-Up Profile: HoneycombData

Company
HoneycombData Ltd. (web site not yet available)

Location
HQs in Santa Clara, CA, offices in Beijing, China

Founded in
2015

Financial funding
$6 million and $2.5 milion in 2015, $3.5 million an $15 million in 2016 by not revealed VCs from USA an Asia

Main executive

President and CEO and co-founder Tim Ding, was co-founder and founding CEO of TiDAL Systems (sold to Micron), VP of sales and technical marketing at Link A Media Devices (acquired by Hynix in 2012 for $248 million), director of sales and marketing at LSI (now Broadcom), manager hardware department at Microstor & Castlewood Systems, and staff/advisory engineer at Seagate.

Number of employees
10

Products description
HoneycombData’ scale-out all-flash and hybrid arrays are enclosed into 2U rackmount unit (35kg) with two Intel E5-60 6-core processors, 64GB to 1,536GB of RAM, and the following storage devices:

• 3x4TB NVMe SSDs and optional 4x1TB SATA HDDs/SSDs (model HD216-D)
• 16x1TB VMe SSDs and optional 4x1TB SATA HDDs/SSDs (model HD216-C)
• 32x1TB VMe SSDs and optional 4x1TB SATA HDDs/SSDs (model HD216-B)
• 48x1TB VMe SSDs and optional 4x1TB SATA HDDs/SSDs, all of them expandable to 2TB for a maximum capacity of 96TB (model HD216-A).

SSDs are originated from Lite-On and Toshiba.

The four models support dual-port 1GbE and 10GbE connections.

Storage protocols: iSCSI, object access

Management: RESTful, integrated GUI

Third party support: NFS, Redis, Memcached

The company claimed 300,000 IO/s and 1ms latency for the subsystem.

Software are included for snapshot/clone, backup/restore, replication and migration.

Users can begin with one commodity server and increase capacity later by adding more servers.

Released date
2016 at FMS

Roadmap
Proof of Concept by October 2017

Number of customers
One for database, two in financial sector and two for cloud computing

Competitors
“We focused on customers, not competitors,” said Ding. There are currently 78 other all-flash vendors in the world.