OakGate Technology
Redefining the Storage Industry

Driven by the ever-increasing demand for cloud computing and big data across multiple industries, hyper-scale data centers are growing at a dizzying pace. IT Managers are challenged to keep up with this explosive growth while balancing key infrastructure building blocks such as servers, storage, and networks. Storage, in particular, is a critical component in data centers. In addition to meeting the insatiable demand for raw storage and optimizing performance, CIOs must clearly understand the ever-dynamic workloads, analyze these workloads, and take actions to optimize data center operation.

For today’s IT Managers and CIOs, the first step is to understand their specific storage workloads. This requires the right tools to capture and analyze workloads. This is where OakGate Technology comes into the picture with its Workload Intelligence technology. This technology provides capabilities not just to capture and analyze storage workloads, but to replay it on an OakGate test appliance. The IT team can now use these insights to optimize data center applications. This information can also be used to select the right storage devices and better manage their performance and longevity.

Over the years, OakGate has been at the forefront of delivering validation and analytics solutions for solid-state storage. The company led the industry with products supporting NVMe and is now leading the charge with PCIe Gen4 solutions. SSD suppliers rely on validation platform and workload analytics technology to improve their products for data center applications. According to Bob Weisickle, CTO and Co-founder, “Our data center customers have extensively used OakGate products to select storage devices with the right functionality and performance. With the new Workload Intelligence technology, we are providing IT professionals and CIOs an advanced toolset to analyze and improve the overall storage performance in their data centers.

We have also introduced products supporting the EDSFF form factor favored by data center customers.”

Established in 2009, OakGate pioneered validation tools for the emerging SSD and flash storage market. As storage transitioned to PCIe interface and NVMe protocol, SSD suppliers needed a test platform to ensure that their products met functionality, quality, and performance expectations. OakGate team comprised of storage industry veterans took on this challenge head on and addressed it with the development of an exceptional test platform to validate a diverse range of storage products. Today, the company is considered the “gold standard” for validation. Utilized by all major suppliers and users of solid-state storage, OakGate commands the strongest footprint in the industry across the entire storage value chain. The company caters its solution to the customers who provide flash controller silicon, offer SSDs and flash cards, storage system OEMs and hyper-scale data centers that use SSDs and storage systems. OakGate also has critical partnerships in place for quality, reliability and manufacturing test solutions, thus covering the whole spectrum from the early development phase, all the way out to production.

OakGate views hyper-scale data centers as the next major avenue for growth. Weisickle explains, “We have established a close working relationship with several major players in this segment. With the help of their inputs, we are aggressively driving innovation that will enable data center CIOs enhance their understanding of workloads, analyze these workloads, and optimize their storage and IT infrastructure. We are very excited about the next phase of our growth in data centers.”

Going forward, OakGate’s strategy is to extend its leadership stature and tackle the ever-emerging challenges faced by its data center customer through further development and innovation in workload monitoring, analytics, and relay technology. “We see that there is a shared value proposition and mutual benefit for data centers and SSD suppliers to work together to improve performance of SSDs for data center applications and that’s the future that we are working towards,” concludes Weisickle.