Spotlight Series: Adam Roberts

I know John Scaramuzzo, Chief Revenue Officer of Nyriad, very well having worked for, and with, him in various capacities, including at SanDisk and Western Digital. When John was thinking about joining Nyriad, he reached out to me to ask what I thought of the company and the value it could bring to the market. I was working in IBM’s cloud division driving strategy for cloud storage at the time. I felt, as did John, that Nyriad brought unique technology and value to the industry. A petabyte scale array utilizing a new and groundbreaking CPU/GPU architecture is unique and operationally efficient.  We kept in touch and when the time was right, I came to work for Nyriad. The potential I could see in what Nyriad is doing brought me here.

What value does Nyriad bring to storage?

Customer demand for storage capacity is at an all-time high and continuing to grow with no end in sight. The ideal storage solution would deliver capacity while balancing performance, resiliency, and efficiency. However, today’s storage architectures force customers to sacrifice one, two, or even all three of these attributes just to keep data flowing and accessible. This is an acute problem that many of us in the storage business have been working on for a long time. We’ve made improvements, but never quite solved the problem in an elegant way. The Nyriad® UltraIO™ storage architecture combines the power of GPUs and CPUs to deliver an unprecedented combination of performance, resilience, and efficiency in a single storage system that is simple to deploy, operate, scale, and maintain. A new storage architecture that can do this was long overdue.

How do you view your role as Field Chief Technology Officer?

Customers tend to ask technology companies for specific things they think will solve their problems. Customers request solutions that ease a specific pain point they are feeling, but it is up to the developers and strategists to create architectures that don’t suffer from the pain points in the first place. Everywhere I’ve worked, I’ve focused on engaging with customers, learning as much as I can about their problems, and working with development teams on new and better ways to solve them at an architectural level. At Nyriad, my job is what it’s always been at every tech company I’ve worked for: to be a customer mentor and technical partner who illustrates the art of the possible, to open customers’ eyes to what the new Nyriad storage architecture can deliver for them today, and to work with them over time to evolve and improve upon what we’re already doing.

What do you see as the future of storage and the role Nyriad can play?

Growing demand for data will continue to force larger capacity storage devices. Larger capacity devices generate performance density challenges: as capacity goes up, performance density goes down. In fact, to keep up, if you double the capacity of the box, you’ve got to double the performance just to keep performance density the same as previous designs. Rebuild times to replace large capacity drives doubles as well. Nyriad’s groundbreaking CPU/GPU architecture will help alleviate these pains even more for future solutions relying on next generation dense capacity devices. When a drive fails in a RAID 6 array, there is significant performance degradation. The user experiencing performance loss in this state usually forces an immediate rebuild to alleviate the pain. Further, because the time it takes to rebuild drives is often measured in weeks, the ability to move smoothly into next generation larger capacity drives are hampered. Lacking unified storage solutions, to achieve this, enterprises must cobble together and manage multiple iterations of file systems, object solutions, and block solutions in less-than-optimal configurations. These piecemeal configurations increase the risk of failures.  Nyriad provides a universal storage option by providing block level erasure codes that fit underneath file and object solutions, allowing for a single high-performance method of resiliency, eliminating the need for multiple protection schemes. This value will only increase over time as we move forward. Nyriad’s UltraIO storage architecture is an opportunity to break out of this vicious cycle.