A new world
of data

Leading the evolution of storage beyond the black box

CNEX is a privately held start-up company founded in 2013 by semiconductor industry veterans in Silicon Valley, and funded by venture capital and strategic investments from Fortune 500 companies in storage and networking. CNEX is chartered to deliver innovative system solutions in the form of semiconductors and software. For its first product, CNEX teamed with NAND Flash manufacturers and customers to develop a revolutionary new NVMe PCIe SSD controller ASIC that supports LightNVM/Open-Channel operation, and includes native NVMoE I/O connectivity. CNEX SSD controllers deliver high-performance with low and predictable latency, and provide flexibility for software-defined-storage with host-based FTL, and Ethernet I/O for storage fabric scalability.

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Product technology

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Advanced FTL Control

In addition to NVMe-compliant operation, CNEX SSD controllers support other operational modes, including LightNVM, which enable full host control over Data Placement, I/O scheduling, and other application-specific optimizations, in both kernel and user space.

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Network Scalability

CNEX SSD controller ASICs incorporate native 10GbE I/O interfaces with NVMoE to enable efficient, low-latency scaling to complement both PCIe and Ethernet-based switching, from simple SSD fanout, to modern storage fabric implementations.

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Hardware acceleration

The CNEX SSD controllers enable key FTL functionality to be “hardware accelerated” for low-latency and maximum throughput for optimal performance from today’s 3D-NAND, as well as new and emerging NVM technologies.

Applications

Datacenter

Datacenter customers are rapidly redefining the traditional partitions between storage, networking, and compute to achieve incredible levels of efficiency and scalability. Datacenter customers use CNEX products to innovate beyond the limits of traditional commodity storage devices, and gain significant advantages in performance, control, scalability, and overall power efficiency.

Storage

Advances in Non-Volatile-Media and networking technology are driving an evolution in storage products, from JBOFs to all-flash arrays. Storage vendors are tasked with providing dense storage, which can be scaled, and dynamically provisioned to address a wide range of work-loads and QoS demands. Storage vendors use CNEX products to achieve application-specific performance and functionality, and native NVMoE fabric connectivity for efficient scaling.

SSD

CNEX has teamed with NAND vendors and other industry leaders in Datacenter, Storage, and Networking, to develop a new generation of SSD controllers that offer host interface flexibility, from NVMe to LightNVM, with options for native fabric connectivity. Customers use CNEX SSD controllers to deliver differentiated SSD solutions for low-power and high-performance in M.2, U.2, U.3, HHHL, EDSFF and other form-factors.

Company

Leadership Team

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Alan Armstrong CEO, Co-Founder
Joe_DeFranco
Joe DeFranco VP Sales, Co-Founder
Scott-Furey
Scott Furey VP Engineering

Board of Directors

  • Alan Armstrong CNEX Labs
  • Lip-Bu Tan Walden International
  • Ben Yu Sierra Ventures
  • Gregg Adkin Dell Technologies Capital
  • Bill Moore Independent
  • Michael Raam Independent

Investors

  • Sierra ventures
  • Walden International
  • Microsoft Ventures
  • Dell Technologies
  • LDV
  • Ciasco Investments
  • Micron
  • Samsung
  • UMC Capital
  • Seagate

Careers

CNEX is on a mission to deliver the next big innovation for solid-state-storage, and our employees enjoy a shared sense of purpose and passion to realize this vision. We thrive on customer success, and our corporate values revolve around bringing together talented people from multiple disciplines and providing an environment where new ideas can turn into advantages for our customers. If you enjoy solving tough problems in a fast-paced environment and want to make an impact on the industry with other fun and talented people, then we should talk. CNEX offers competitive salaries and benefits, company equity, and is proud to be an equal opportunity employer.

To apply, click a link above, or send your resume to careers@cnexlabs.com

Contact us

US Headquarters

2880 Stevens Creek Blvd.
Suite 300
San Jose, CA 95128

Europe

Copenhagen, Denmark

Asia

Shanghai, China
Hangzhou, China
Tokyo, Japan