Intel and Samsung invest in fast memory start-up

Intel and Samsung have identified a new fast memory access technology and have made venture investments in the company behind it.

Western Digital has also invested in US-based Kazan Networks that has closed a $4.5m Series A funding round.

The communications interface technology is used to access solid-state drives (SSDs) used in datacentre storage and cloud service farms.

Kazan Networks has developed a sub-1us latency technique for connecting non-volatile memory express (NVMe) over Fabrics storage, as demonstrated at last years Intel Developers Forum, to racks of servers in the datacentre

It is an Ethernet-based interface that uses RDMA acceleration. Simultaneous RoCE and iWARP support means customers need not worry about choosing one protocol over the other.

NVMe was developed in 2010 as a high speed interface for solid-state storage devices as an alternative to legacy device interconnects, such as Fibre Channel, SAS, or SATA. Hooked in to the PCI

Express technology roadmap it takes advantage of the parallelism of solid state devices.

“NVMe over Fabrics is a key enabler to support attaching thousands of NVMe SSDs in modern rack-scale designs,” said Amber Huffman, Intel Fellow in the Non-Volatile Memory Solutions Group at Intel Corporation and chair of NVMe Workgroup.

“Kazan has been a leader in the standards definition, and their products enable the ecosystem to connect storage to the fabrics in an integrated manner.”

“Raising money these days is not trivial, yet we ended up with an over-subscribed round, which I think speaks to the strength of both the team and our product direction,” said Joe Steinmetz, CEO of Kazan Networks. “This round sets us up nicely to continue to grow the team and execute our roadmap through 2016 and beyond.”