The inspiration for Cachengo started with our visionary CEO and Founder, Ash Young, who has spent the last 30+ years pioneering new technology in the storage industry.

The storage architecture and software stack that is commonplace today was his idea over 20 years ago, back when most people had never even heard of Linux or open source. As the status quo eventually reached obsolescence, the time finally seemed right to make a change.

The genesis for Network Attached Storage (NAS) was to solve a multi-protocol problem. Once upon a time, various departments utilized different operating systems that had their own protocols for communicating. This created a very expensive multi-dialect problem within companies, which extended to an even bigger problem between companies. NAS solved this problem very efficiently. However, over the past 20 years, NAS has become the core building block of today’s Cloud storage. But it’s the wrong architecture for today’s needs. Rather than solving a very expensive problem, it is now the main contributor to an even bigger problem than the one solved back in the 1990s.

Ash recognized that the solution wasn’t to be found in bigger and faster chips or in creating faster versions of disk drives. The solution was a different architecture. Rather than changing the core components or building blocks within today’s storage solutions, a simple re-architecture of how things are organized could amass a much more significant reduction in power consumption while delivering much higher performance and new capabilities.