Israeli Start-Up Recently Discovered: Plexistor

Start-up Plexistor Ltd will soon be unveiling a Software-Defined Memory (SDM) platform for next-generation data centers, bringing convergence of memory and storage technologies together, enabling high capacity persistent storage and near-memory speed by providing a direct data path from the application to the memory storage device.

Backed by Battery Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners, Plexistor is led by CEO Sharon Azulai, an experienced entrepreneur with a proven track record in creating new markets and rapid revenue growth by leveraging disruptive technologies and innovation; and CTO Dr. Amit Golander, who has extensive IT infrastructure R&D experience across storage, servers and networks.

SDM will support a wide range of memory and storage technologies such as volatile DRAM and emerging non-volatile memory devices such as NVDIMM-N and 3D XPoint as well as traditional flash storage devices such as NVMe and the upcoming NVMe over Fabric, enabling a scalable infrastructure to deliver persistent high capacity storage at near-memory speed.

“Over the past five years we have seen a lot of improvement in application performance, both in latency and throughput, with the extensive use of flash technologies. But in a blink of an eye the world has changed again, with the need for web-scale in-memory applicatons, boasting massive working sets and demanding real time analytics,” said Arun Taneja, founder of analyst firm Taneja Group. “These requirements can only be met with coalescing the persistence and capacity of storage technologies with speed and low latency from memory technologies. Enter Software-Defined Memory, a category we see forming over the next two years. Plexistor is clearly pioneering this category and we see 2016 as a breakout year for them. This couldn’t be happening at a better time.”

“Enterprise IT is facing a strong demand from increasingly latency-sensitive applications while at the same time ingesting 40 times more data than five years ago,” said Azulai. “The result is an increase in data center complexity, higher costs and slower IT response time to business needs. We look forward to introducing a new way to handle the massive data pressure and perform quickly and efficiently without being cost prohibitive.”

SDM solutions will utilize standard, heterogeneous, off-the-shelf persistent memory devices, and present them using standard APIs in a way that hides the internal complexity. SDM implementation will go further, enabling users to run large working data sets at lower costs, and offer backward compatibility with traditional storage-based applications to achieve near-memory performance levels.

Plexistor’s SDM platform is on track for beta release in the first quarter of 2016.

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Coming out of stealth this month, Plexistor was founded in Israel in December 2013 and is headquartered in Mountain View, CA, with R&D in Herzliya, Israel.

It got a series A round in September 2014 for an undisclosed amount from Battery Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners.

Main executives:

Founder and CEO Sharon Azulai was previously CEO and founder of Tonian, a software company developing high performance NAS scale-out storage for virtualization prior to its acquisition by Primary Data in August of 2013. Before that, he was a venture partner at Blumberg Capital, an early-stage venture capital firm focusing on investing in innovative and disruptive digital and social media, SaaS/technology.

CTO and R&D manager Dr. Amit Golander was formerly VP of systems and product for Primary Data where he was responsible for strategic partnerships, alliances and beta customers as well as working closely with the R&D teams on the day-to-day product management. He also worked for IBM for over twelve years on data center and cloud infrastructure. He holds over 50 patents.

Senior director product Kumar Prabhat was VP of product marketing and business development at CloudByte, a software-defined storage start-up before joining Plexistor. Earlier, he was VP of product management at Enterprise Nube, a SaaS and social start-up funded by Accel Partner. He also has been entrepreneur and he founded two founded software start-ups, WorldDesk, in desktop virtualization software, and MarketWiz, in hosted CRM software. As founder and CEO of MarketWiz, a Silicon Valley start-up, he took the company from idea to venture funding, customer acquisition and sale to Allegis Corporation, now ClickCommerce, a publicly traded software company. In addition, he worked with companies in flash memory space such as AMD, Spansion and SK Hynix.

One year ago Fusion-IO people at SanDisk made the first attempt to define software-defined memory (SDM). A lot has changed since then. 2015 was a crucial year for the standardization of non-volatile DIMM (NVDIMM) components. There have also been several announcements of new storage-class memory devices like Intel and Micron 3D-Xpoint, HP and SanDisk RRAM and Sony and Viking ReRAM.

SDM from Plexistor is a file system for use with these emerging technologies, a storage software that virtualizes traditional block-based storage hardware and often also mixes different storage tiers and provides data services.

Plexistor stated: "(we have) built a new SDM platform to leverage volatile DRAM and emerging persistent memory, such as NVDIMM-N and the forthcoming 3DXPoint, with large capacity, persistence of storage and performance of memory. Plexistor's solution upgrades infrastructure to ultra-low latency converged primary storage that enables in-memory applications to run large data sets at memory speeds. 100 times faster than flash SSD, Plexistor's SDM supports next-generation applications such as relational databases, in-memory databases, NoSQL, big data analytics, and complex event processing that challenge traditional compute and storage resources."

In a patent you can read that "Persistent Memory (PM) is a newly emerging technology which is capable of storing data such that it can continue to be accessed using machine level instructions (e.g. memory load/store) even after a power failure. PM can be implemented through a nonvolatile media attached to CPU of the computer."

Why is it more efficient?

Three patents of Plexistor: