Company · About

We move the data that powers AI.

Compute gets the headlines. Data movement decides whether your GPUs ever run. For more than a decade Zettar has done one thing with uncommon focus — get massive data where it needs to be, fast and fully verified. We took that work from a U.S. DOE world record to a turnkey appliance — every hardware component selected, matched, and pretuned to our zx data mover — so you get record-setting throughput the day it's racked.

Our story

Born at Stanford and SLAC. Proven at exascale.

Zettar was founded in 2008 by Dr. Chin Fang (CEO), with roots at Stanford and SLAC. Since 2014 the focus has never wavered: solve the problem most tools ignore until it stalls everything — moving enormous volumes of data fast enough to keep data-intensive science and infrastructure running.

Since 2015 we've been engaged on SLAC's LCLS-II, a U.S. DOE exascale-class instrument that demanded throughput far beyond what conventional tools could deliver. With SLAC and ESnet, in 2018 our software data mover set the record — 1 PB in 29 hours at 96% link utilization over a 5,000-mile loop, encrypted and checksummed end to end. Zettar also won the Supercomputing Asia 2019 Data Mover Challenge, and we kept proving it in public: SC21 with DDN and NVIDIA, SC22 on the NVIDIA DPU, an AIC/Intel appliance at SC23, and SC24 on the NVIDIA DPU again, with MiTAC's participation.

As the AI era turned data movement into the bottleneck, we packaged everything we'd proven into the turnkey zx Appliance — with the hardware selected, matched, and pretuned to zx as one engineered system. Its proven core platform is the HPE ProLiant DL380 Gen 11. It uses Linux as the OS and moves data roughly 10× faster than typical commercial or freeware movers. We don't sell AI. We move the data that powers it.

What we believe

Three convictions, earned the hard way

Data movement is its own infrastructure layer

Compute, storage, and network are treated as first-class infrastructure. Moving data between them should be too. When it isn't, GPUs idle and pipelines stall — so we engineer the data-movement layer with the same seriousness as the rest of the stack.

Co-design beats endless tuning

Wire-speed transfer shouldn't be a science project. Rather than hand you knobs to turn across firewalls and mismatched hardware, we co-design hardware and software into one validated appliance — so you get the result, not the homework.

Proof over promises

Every claim we make is backed by a number you can check. A petabyte in 29 hours. 96% link utilization. A challenge win against the field. Reproducible results at national-lab scale — not marketing math.

Milestones

The record, year by year

2015SLAC · U.S. DOE

LCLS-II engagement begins

Zettar is engaged on LCLS-II at SLAC — the U.S. Department of Energy's exascale-class instrument — to solve data movement at a scale conventional tools could not reach.

2018SLAC · ESnet · AIC

1 PB in 29 hours — a world record

With SLAC and ESnet, Zettar moves 1 PB in 29 hours at 96% link utilization over a 5,000-mile loop, encrypted and checksummed end to end. Source →

2019Supercomputing Asia

Data Mover Challenge winner

Zettar wins the Supercomputing Asia 2019 Data Mover Challenge, validating its data mover against the field on a global stage. Source →

2020U.S. DOE · ESnet

ESnet evaluates zx on its DTNs

U.S. DOE's ESnet completes an in-depth evaluation of zx on its data transfer nodes, confirming 2×–7× the performance of Globus GridFTP, among other advantages. Source →

2021SC21 · DDN · NVIDIA

SC21 demonstration with DDN and NVIDIA

Zettar demonstrates at-scale data movement at SC21 in partnership with DDN and NVIDIA. Source →

2022SC22 · NVIDIA

SC22 NVIDIA DPU demonstration

At SC22, Zettar shows data movement running on the NVIDIA DPU, offloading the work from conventional servers. Source →

2023SC23 · AIC · Intel

SC23 appliance with AIC and Intel

Zettar unveils a data-movement appliance at SC23 in partnership with AIC and Intel. Source →

2024HPE

The turnkey zx Appliance ships

Everything we proved becomes a product you can buy: the zx Appliance — hardware selected, matched, and pretuned to zx, its proven core platform the HPE ProLiant DL380 Gen 11 — running x86 and ARM on Linux and moving data roughly 10× faster than typical commercial or freeware movers. Source →

2025arXiv · NCHC

Published research, and a new national deployment

Dr. Fang and collaborators publish “Reexamining Paradigms of End-to-End Data Movement” (arXiv, Dec 2025). The same year, Taiwan’s National Center for High-performance Computing (NCHC) puts two Zettar Mini appliances into production across its Tainan and Taichung datacenters. Source →

Outcomes

What that work delivers for customers

1 PB
moved in 29 hours at 96% utilization — with SLAC, ESnet & the U.S. DOE
Line rate
~90%+ of the bandwidth you have — scales out, no ceiling
10×
faster than typical commercial or freeware movers
Get started

Move the data that powers AI.

See the turnkey zx Appliance move petabytes at wire speed — record-setting throughput the day it's racked — co-designed and fully supported.