Nyriad on Sale

Last January 26, 3 WW storage market observers received a note from Nyriad, Inc. indicating that the board of directors has decided to put the company, or part of it even its technology asset, on sale. As the memo, accessible here, indicated, time is key in the deal process with a deadline to receive letters of intent before February 21, 2024 representing 26 days, less than a month.

This information represents sad news. We met several times Nyriad and its team developing UltraIO, a HDD oriented block storage array leveraging a GPU based Erasure Coding controller. Beyond patents, the company had several successes in M&E and HPC among others and demonstrated the value of its approach. The team even introduced a few months ago a StaaS model to boost its sale.

In fact, it has appeared that the sales figures got a bit below initial goals playing in a tough business climate with flash eating all aspects of storage except secondary storage domain globally. At the same time, a secondary block storage has a limiting expansion zone without a file and or object flavor. Nyriad had picked key partners in the domain but long sales cycle has made tough the mission.

At the same time, we see Graid Technology on a hockey stick trajectory with its GPU based RAID card for NVMe SSDs that illustrates very well how GPU computing capabilities could be associated in the highly intensive computation cycles needed by EC or RAID.

We estimate that Nyriad technology could be acquired by a vendor such as Infinidat or Nexsan, very RAID centric, DDN or even HPE. According to Crunchbase, the company has raised so far around $60 million. We’ll see.

Based on the technology developed, the nature of the product and new offerings like StaaS, Coldago has selected Nyriad as a Gem for 2024 and clearly the company should land in the hands on a key player as examples mentioned above, who needs this GPU fueled erasure coding controller.