With backing from Nvidia and Intel, startup Pliops is working to make data-center storage more efficient. Credit: Quest Software Rivals Intel and Nvidia are on the same side when it comes to the funding of a startup that promises to make flash storage orders of magnitude faster. The two are among numerous investors in Pliops, which is developing a specialized storage processor that it says allows applications to access data kept in flash storage up to 100 times faster than with traditional approaches while using a fraction of the electricity required by traditional hardware. Pliops has a list of investors that’s hard to ignore. In addition to Intel and Nvidia, the startup’s investors include Xilinx, Western Digital Corp., Viola Ventures, SOMV, SoftBank Ventures Asia, Expon Capital and Sweetwood Capital. Its most recent round of funding, announced last month, totaled $65 million. Founded in 2017, Pliops has raised $115 million in venture funding to date. The most recent investment will be used to continue development of the Pliops Storage Processor (PSP), a hardware-enabled storage engine on a PCIe card form factor that works with storage class memory (SCM) (Intel’s Optane) and QLC NVMe SSDs to accelerate and protect databases for cloud and enterprise applications. The PSP targets databases for an inherent inefficiency. Both relational and NoSQL databases today use “key-value” (KV) storage engines: The data is indexed by “keys” and stored as “values.” KV engines typically enable variable-sized keys and values, which can be problematic with high IOPS SSDs because you are dealing with variable-sized data on devices with a fixed block size. That means lots of compression and lots of disk writes. Flash’s performance and endurance, meanwhile, are limited by the number of writes. Flash drives eventually wear out and retain less data the more you write to them. Therefore, you would ideally want to do less compression and a lot less disk writing, which is where the PSP comes in. It does the compression and reduces the number of writes that need to be done. Pliops claims the PSP offers a very simple and effective option for lowering the total cost of ownership of public/private cloud infrastructure and on-premise data centers. The accelerator card can be plugged into existing servers, and organizations don’t have to rewrite their existing applications to take advantage of the speed boost. Mark Mokryn, vice president of products at Pliops, dives into the technical detail in this blog post. Since its PCIe accelerators are attached to servers, Pliops supports on-prem data centers and is targeting cloud service providers. In announcing the funding, the company said it is engaged with leaders in the “cloud service provider and broader enterprise market segments.” They are clearly on to something. Last November, Pliops won the “Best of Show Award” in the Most Innovative Flash Memory Enterprise Business Application category at the Flash Memory Summit (FMS) 2020. Keep an eye on this company. I know I will. Related content news Pure Storage adds AI features for security and performance Updated infrastructure-as-code management capabilities and expanded SLAs are among the new features from Pure Storage. By Andy Patrizio Jun 26, 2024 3 mins Enterprise Storage Data Center news Nvidia teases next-generation Rubin platform, shares physical AI vision ‘I'm not sure yet whether I'm going to regret this or not,' said Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang as he revealed 2026 plans for the company’s Rubin GPU platform. By Andy Patrizio Jun 17, 2024 4 mins CPUs and Processors Data Center news Intel launches sixth-generation Xeon processor line With the new generation chips, Intel is putting an emphasis on energy efficiency. By Andy Patrizio Jun 06, 2024 3 mins CPUs and Processors Data Center news AMD updates Instinct data center GPU line Unveiled at Computex 2024. the new AI processing card from AMD will come with much more high-bandwidth memory than its predecessor. By Andy Patrizio Jun 04, 2024 3 mins CPUs and Processors Data Center PODCASTS VIDEOS RESOURCES EVENTS NEWSLETTERS Newsletter Promo Module Test Description for newsletter promo module. Please enter a valid email address Subscribe