Start-Up Profile: Attala Systems

HQs
San Jose, CA

Date founded
September 2015, just out of stealth mode

Financial funding
Early investment from Sify Technologies Limited, an IT service provider in India, and other angel investors.

Main executives
Sujith Arramreddy and Sai Gadiraju are serial entrepreneurs having founded Serverworks (in X86 server chipsets and sold to Broadcom) and ServerEngines (in 10GbE and server management technology and sold to Emulex). Taufik Ma spent 17 years at Intel before joining Aarohi Communications which was also acquired by Emulex. Together at Emulex, the three founders created and acquired customers for the first 10GbE converged networking/storage controller to ship over a million units.

Members of advisory board

Jay Kidd having SVP and CTO roles at NetApp and Brocade
Chris McBride with multiple customer-facing executive roles at Baffle, BlueArc, McData, Hitachi Data Systems and other companies

Number of employees
34

Technology
The core technology is a FPGA-based fabric that leverages standard Ethernet and RDMA to interconnect compute, storage and networking resources across a data center. The firm uses Intel FPGAs to provide sophisticated processing capabilities that can be changed/updated quicker than in ASICs, but that provide the level of functionality acceleration that can’t be achieved with software alone. Attala has taken SDS, extended it to include FPGA programming and created a new platform that harvests the efficiencies and benefits of a hardware implementation. Low cost, latency, predictable performance, automation and scale-out are achieved; especially critical as SSDs and storage-class memory continue to get faster and cheaper.

The company got Best of Show Award at 2017 Flash Memory Summit, recognizing achievements in three areas: NVMe Storage Systems, NVMe over Fabric (NVMe-oF) I/O adapters, and software for management of flash storage systems.

Products description
The Attala High Performance Composable Storage Infrastructure solution, just announced, is based on FPGA-based fabric technology. For applications’ storage needs, it enables cloud-style agility and no-touch provisioning with bare-metal latency and predictable performance. The infrastructure is scale-out and automated to simplify operation and reduce costs. By being an end-to-end system, it also avoids the DIY performance and deployment risks associated with third party/open-source software-based solutions. The result is an adaptable storage infrastructure that is essentially an elastic block storage (EBS) solution “on steroids”.

Partners
Include Intel and Microsemi with a collaboration to help customers automate their NVMe storage infrastructure with Switchtec PCIe storage switches, integrated programmable processor and enclosure management software

Number of customers
Some currently qualifying the products

Customers
The target customer base is in the cloud and in the real-time analytics markets.

Applications
Bare-metal workload, high-performance databases, real-time analytics and big-data, virtualized or containerized stateful workloads that need predictable storage performance

Target market
Cloud service providers, e-commerce sites, MSPs, telco providers, financial services, and real-time digital enterprises

Competitors
Conventional AFA appliances and SDS solutions that don’t meet performance, cost, automation and scalability requirements for cloud and analytics. This includes companies that have recently entered the storage market with NVMe-oF based products.