Soon Out of Stealth Mode: Start-Up Radian Memory Systems

Radian Memory Systems, Inc. is a start-up supposed to be soon out of stealth mode.

Before this official announcement, here is what we found on this new storage company on the Web.

The firm, headquartered in Calabasas, CA, was founded in 2011 and got already $4.5 million in four financial rounds:

• $1.1 million (seed round) on March 10, 2012
• $1.1 million (angel) on April 8, 2013
• 640,000 (angel) on September 19, 2013
• $1.7 million (angel) on February 17, 2014

CEO and director is Michael Jadon who was GM, memory storage and distributed processing, at Curtiss-Wright Controls from October 2008 to August 2009, GM and U.S. CTO at VMETRO (acquired by Curtiss-Wright Controls for $72 million in 2008)  from August 2007 to October 2008, and formerly GM of Micro Memory (acquired by VMETRO) for more than twelve years. Curtiss-Wright storage products currently include commercial and rugged, removable storage subsystems utilizing SSD and HDD for a range of applications.

We discovered other names in the company:

• Robert Lercari, co-founder VP of engineering, who also was previously like Jadon at Curtiss Wright Controls, VMETRO and Micro Memory
• Andrey Kuzmin, co-founder and chief scientist, who worked at Isilon and Veritas, and in 2006 at Micro Memory
• Wayne Rickard, VP business development, during 2002 to 2009 VP, chief technologist, consumer solutions, for
  Seagate
• Jim Wayda, chief architect, previously at Active Storage, iStor Networks and Dot Hill
• Yossi Goldfill, principal software engineer, for around three years at Curtiss Wright Controls
• Phap Nguyen, with the same position, and during seven years at Micro Memory
• Alan Chen, principal software architect

Note among the board’s members since January 2014 there is Brian Dexheimer who worked at Seagate from 1990 to 2009 finishing as CMO ad then president of consumer solutions.

The start-up, with R&D in Russia, stated it is “developing transformative software that will change the way storage memory is utilized in enterprise and cloud computing environments.”

More precisely it has developed a new enterprises software for flash in data center storage. It has combined software-defined principles with a ‘top down’ system level perspective that addresses the limitations of flash to create a new tier of storage.

For a better understanding of the technology, here is the summary of a patent, number 20140215129, published on July 310, 2014, Cooperative Flash Memory Control, assigned to three executives of the company, Kuzmin, Jadon, and former CTO Richard M. Mathews who left Radian:
“This disclosure provides for host-controller cooperation in managing NAND flash memory. The controller maintains information for each erase unit which tracks memory usage. This information assists the host in making decisions about specific operations, for example, initiating garbage collection, space reclamation, wear leveling or other operations. For example, metadata can be provided to the host identifying whether each page of an erase unit has been released, and the host can specifically then command each of consolidation and erase using direct addressing. By redefining host-controller responsibilities in this manner, much of the overhead association with FTL functions can be substantially removed from the memory controller, with the host directly specifying physical addresses. This reduces performance unpredictability and overhead, thereby facilitating integration of SSDs with other forms of storage. The disclosed techniques are especially useful for direct-attached and/or network-attached storage.”