Innovator of High-Performance All-Flash Storage Arrays, AccelStor Empowers IT Infrastructure with the True Power of Flash

AccelStor addresses the evident performance gap through the software platform called FlexiRemap^® which powers NeoSapphire all-flash storage arrays. Delivering extremely high levels of performance across a wide variety of high-IO and low latency use-cases, FlexiRemap^® is a game changer for Artificial Intelligence, Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, and High-Performance Computing deployments. It also provides robust data-protection and rich enterprise-class integration points with VMware, Microsoft, and OpenStack solutions.ccelStor recognizes that in today’s ever-changing technology era, enterprise IT requires high performance storage systems to effectively handle data access traffic. Due to strong innovation on the network and compute layers of the infrastructure stack, the performance bottleneck is in legacy disk-based storage systems. Even all-flash storage can fail to meet application performance requirements in today’s demanding environments. To bridge this market gap, AccelStor was founded in 2014 by storage, networking, and software veterans from Microsoft, Dell EMC, and Xtera. Through this knowledge and expertise, AccelStor has been leading the paradigm shift from conventional disk arrays to fully utilized all-flash storage platforms.

“AI is a flourishing industry, and AccelStor all-flash solutions play the key role in AI, we are feeling strong demand on the data storage and data protection sides of that use-case.”, says Charles Tsai, President of AccelStor.

With the success of FlexiRemap^®, AccelStor is one of the leading enterprise storage OEM’s and is now developing business globally. As AccelStor continues to gain more ground, the NeoSapphire platform is setting a new standard for SSD performance and application service levels.

The Next Step

The technology world is going through a myriad of breakthroughs. There are new innovations that

are being brought forward to tackle enterprise challenges every day. In this ever-evolving industry, AccelStor’s growth is focused around the six key focus areas where performance requirements are mandatory: Artificial Intelligence (AI), the Internet of Things (IoT), High Performance Computing (HPC), Virtualization, Structured Data, and FinTech use cases like blockchain.

As the world moves to more effectively consume flash storage and conventional storage systems have become passé. AccelStor plans to leverage its leadership position to drive more value to customers through scale-up-and-out all-flash NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) systems for performance, and QLC SSDs for write-once-read-forever applications.

AccelStor acknowledges that the application performance bottleneck often rests with storage and are proud to hand that baton back to the compute layer for the next round of innovation. “In our experience there aren’t very many server platforms that can reasonably push our NeoSapphire storage systems, once they figure out how to do it – we look forward to handing them the performance bottleneck baton once again.” – Chaan Beard, the Chief Solutions Architect at AccelStor.

Interview Snippet with AccelStor President Charles Tsai

Q: How Successful was your first project?

From the get-go, we have earned a lot of recognition from our customers. They believe in our products, trust their data to our technology and are delighted with what we, as a company, have been able to deliver to them. For instance, our NeoSapphire All-Flash system helped one customer increase the number of transactions they could process by over 100X compared to their existing hybrid system. Another realized a reduction in time to process large sets of marketing data from an average of 20 minutes to 10 seconds, allowing them to tailor their marketing messaging in real-time and beat their competition with targeted consumer messaging.

The AccelStor advantage is perhaps most evident with extreme applications like Deep Computing, where we helped boost a big data analytics platform by 8.5X, reducing an unstructured deep computing analysis from 17 days to under 2, letting the customer rapidly respond to market trends – translating directly to their bottom line.

Q: “Leaders cannot optimize results by themselves; they need employees’ support and assistance”. How does your company interpret this?

It’s a nice quote, but not 100% precise. At AccelStor, the reality of leadership is more about partnership over the “leaders versus employees”. Our organization is very flat, so when we get a new idea, the initiators who take the first jump in and contribute their vision and experience to the idea. That guides the direction of the group, but the additional members are encouraged join in and help develop or even contradict the early idea. In the end, we work together to create something great for our customers, and with all of our members focused on that we almost always arrive at a consensus quickly.

Leading a company is like sailing a boat, each person has their own responsibility and know-how. It takes all of us to make the boat sail around the world, nobody can do it alone.

Q: What are the reasons behind AccelStor’s reputation?

We care, so much, about every product and service we provide to our customers. We do our best to keep every promise and exceed our customers’ expectations. At AccelStor, we have a very strict standard for product specification and testing, and we understand that customer satisfaction is paramount to our long-term success.

Q: What surprised you as AccelStor has grown and developed?

With the team we have, we are moving so much faster than we ever thought possible. From our core technology, taking it to market, and bringing the paradigm shift we are currently seeing in the market, it all happened so much faster than we imagined. Luckily, we’ve been able to expand our portfolio and stay relevant in an evolving industry. I’m happy to share that we have continued to refine our products, bringing our customer more appealing features, enhancing the value that our customers have experienced and plan to do so for a very long time.

The Man Behind The Picture

Charles Tsai, Ph.D., Co-founder & President: With more than 15 years of experience in the IT industry, Dr. Tsai has held positions at several prestigious companies, including Microsoft, Getac, and AscenVision.  By honing his expertise in people, software, product, and business development throughout his career he feels as though his experience has helped bring together the key people needed to make AccelStor the company it is today.

Prior to his current position, Dr. Tsai was a Senior Director at Innodisk, heading the Cloud Storage Technology Center and Software Technology Service Center. Seeing the storage-performance gap in the market, he drove Innodisk’s spin-off of AccelStor and led the founding team from its inception.

Dr. Tsai earned his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from National Taiwan University and is a member of ACM and IEEE.