Pliops Storage Processor Proven to Boost Flash Performance

Breakthrough Hardware Accelerator Successfully Completes Performance Testing with Multiple Tier-One Cloud, Server and Software Leaders

SAN JOSE, Calif., July 29, 2020 – Faster, more efficient data centers are now one step closer to becoming a reality. Technology innovator Pliops today announced that its new, patent-pending Storage Processor has been successfully tested and evaluated by more than 10 tier-one cloud and enterprise companies – and proven to boost performance by more than 10x, reduce five 9s latency by up to 1000x, and increase flash price/performance by more than 90%. These results were indicated for nearly any workload using flash. Pliops is ramping up for broader engagements, with general availability of its Storage Processor expected later this year.

Reaching an inflection point

Pliops solves the unprecedented scalability challenges raised by the cloud data explosion, the increasing data requirements of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) applications, the recent shift of work, education and entertainment online – and the end of Moore’s Law. All of these factors are colliding together at a time when the world is entering a cycle of economic challenges, necessitating that these additional demands being placed on infrastructures be handled as cost efficiently as possible.

“As the success of GPUs and AI processors has shown, there is a pressing need for specialized solutions that accelerate the pace of workflows,” noted Steve Fingerhut, president and chief business officer for Pliops. “Because data growth is absolutely booming at a time when storage and data processing is slowing, now is the time to take this approach and apply it to mainstream workloads like unstructured and structured databases, analytics and virtually any application that uses flash storage.”

An idea whose time has come

A simple-to-deploy PCIe card that delivers more than 10x performance benefits for databases, server and storage infrastructures, the Pliops Storage Processor represents a new spectrum of dedicated processors.

Fingerhut added, “The days of increasing infrastructure spending to keep up with growth are over. Technology from Pliops delivers breakthrough levels of storage efficiency – and the biggest names in the industry have taken notice.”

“Data center architects are working hard to keep up with the data explosion, which is only accelerating with the new work-from-anywhere phenomenon,” said Peter Zaitsev, co-founder and CEO, Percona. “Enterprises are accelerating the adoption of open-source software to address these challenges and are constantly looking for industry-standard innovations to achieve more efficient scaling. We benchmarked the Pliops Storage Processor’s ability to scale databases, using Percona Monitoring and Management to show graphically how the platform behaved. Our results show that the Pliops Storage Processor can reduce customer costs by delivering substantial increases in performance and space efficiency.”

Unlocking the full value of flash storage

By significantly improving workload performance and optimizing SSD usage, the Pliops Storage Processor reduces storage and processor costs, enables system consolidation, makes much lower cost QLC SSDs viable for mainstream workloads, and is universally applicable with zero application changes. Applications accelerated by Pliops include MySQL, MariaDB, mongoDB, Redis, Oracle, Apache Spark, and Cassandra. Pliops achieves this through an innovative architecture that overcomes the major inefficiencies of software-only storage engines via a dedicated hardware product.

“The way we are addressing storage and database-specific processing challenges is in the same vein of other workload-specific processors, like GPUs and TPUs,” explained Fingerhut. “The Pliops approach accelerates compute-intensive functions and eliminates bottlenecks – solving the dilemma of choosing cost at the expense of performance – and vice versa. We’re thrilled that our Storage Processor has now been thoroughly evaluated by more than 10 industry heavyweights with impressive results.”

Pliops’ Storage Processors are now sampling to select customers, with mass production on track for later this year. Please visit www.pliops.com for more information.

About Pliops

Founded in 2017, Pliops is a technology innovator focused on making data centers run faster and more efficiently. Its technology addresses skyrocketing data volumes and solves the slowing compute performance problem. The company’s Storage Processor is built upon a groundbreaking patent-pending approach that accelerates storage functions. Focused on creating the next wave of the accelerated data center, the Pliops Storage Processor enables cloud and enterprise customers to access data up to 100 times faster – using just a fraction of the computational load and power consumption. With Pliops technology, databases, analytics and other data-intensive applications are able to reach their full potential. Investors include Softbank Ventures Asia, Intel Capital, Western Digital, NVIDIA, and Xilinx.