DSSD is Andy Bechtolsheim’s Secret Chip Startup for Big Data

Over at GigaOm, GigaStacey writes that the solution for better and faster storage may lie in DSSD, a stealthy chip startup backed by Andy Bechtolsheim. Founded in 2010 by Sun Alums Jeff Bonwick and Bill Moore, DSSD is trying to build a chip that would improve the performance and reliability of flash memory for high performance computing, newer data analytics, and networking.

My sources tell me the startup is building a new type of chip — they said it’s really a module, not a chip — that combines a small amount of processing power with a lot of densely-packed memory. The module runs a pared-down version of Linux designed for storing information on flash memory, and is aimed at big data and other workloads where reading and writing information to disk bogs down the application. This fits with the expertise of the team, but this is a problem that others are trying to solve as well with faster and cheaper SSDs and targeted software to to optimize the flow of bits to a database. But the proposal here appears to be about designing an operating system that takes advantage of the difference in Flash memory when compared to hard drives to boost I/O.

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