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Diablo Technologies sheds three execs

NV-DIMM flash tech changes

Two co-founding execs and a senior veep for sales have exited flash NV-DIMM startup Diablo Technologies.

According to their LinkedIn profiles: Riccardo Badalone, co-founder, ex-CEO and chief product officer, left in July 2017, as did his fellow co-founder and veep of strategic customer engineering Franco Forlini

Sales bigwig Dave Ferretti walked the walk earlier this month, and senior solution architect Dennis Huang, departed weeks ago too.

El Reg also understands Diablo booked space at the Flash Memory Summit 2017 but didn’t show up to take it, despite being an "Emerald" tier sponsor.

Diablo's tech offerings

Diablo makes Memory1 DIMMs, 128GB DDR4 system memory modules claimed to be the highest-capacity system memory on the market. There can be up to 128GB of Diablo's flash memory per DIMM, thus fitting up to 2TB of memory in a two-socket server rather than 256GB or 512GB of normal DRAM per box.

The firm also previously made Memory Channel Storage (MCS) which involved flash DIMMs with faster access (20 microsecs) than PCIe flash (105 microsecs) but less than DRAM, and so occupying a new place in the then (2014) memory-storage hierarchy.

It licensed the technology to SanDisk, which sold the resulting ULLtraDIMM technology products to OEMs such as Huawei, Lenovo and Supermicro. A prolonged legal dispute over patents with Netlist didn't help this technology's progress.

In May, Diablo released a set of Memory1 flash DIMM benchmarks to show how these DIMMS make servers go faster. By increasing the cluster memory size with Memory1, the servers were able to improve processing times by as much as 289 per cent while lowering the overall Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) by as much as 51 per cent.

Memory1-equipped servers became available from Supermicro in November 2016.

Diablo Technologies was founded in 2003 when it pulled in $9.8m in funding. Nine years later there was a $36m A-round followed two years later in 2014 with a $13m B-round. This was topped up last year with a $37m C-round, making the funding total $95.8m.

Dave Ferreti is still listed as SVP for global sales on Diablo’s leadership web page but he’s vice president worldwide sales at software-defined server startup TidalScale according to his LinkedIn page.

Diablo’s CEO is Mark Stibitz and he’s also board chairman. Stibitz became CEO in January 2016, when there was fresh funding and Badalone was shunted into the chief product officer position.

The firm's profile said it is developing its third family of memory interface solutions.

We've asked Diablo about the departures and the apparent flash show no-go – and will update this story as and when we hear anything. ®

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