The startup has emerged from stealth to preview a "CPU-less" storage appliance that consolidates processing, networking and storage functionality on field-programmable gate arrays ( #FPGA s) based on an #Altera chipset. #Attala and #Intel, which owns Altera, this week will demonstrate the FPGA storage technology at the Flash Memory Summit in Santa Clara, Calif. Attala calls its system the Attala High Performance Composable Storage Infrastructure, and the vendor positions it mainly as storage for cloud providers and private clouds. It consists of FPGA-powered host interfaces and scale-out data nodes connected via a Remote Direct Memory Access over Converged Ethernet version 2 NVM Express fabric. Attala uses FPGA devices as NVMe storage targets. Instead of a motherboard, the FPGAs also handle processing intelligence and network connectivity. "Our premise is based on one of the main tenets of computer science: You can implement functionality in hardware much more efficiently than you can in software," said Taufik Ma, founder of Attala Systems, based in San Jose, Calif. The trend in storage has been away from expensive custom FPGAs to systems built on common x86 servers, shifting the differentiating features to the software. But Ma said engineering advances have added value to FPGAs. "We've reached the point in the industry where you can pack enough logic, enough gates and enough data paths into a single FPGA. An FPGA is [no longer] just a very expensive prototyping platform, but a perfectly affordable production platform," Ma added.
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