McKENZIE — Cachengo, a manufacturer of computer components, begins operations later this month in the McKenzie South Industrial Park, where as many as 1,000 local employees in McKenzie and Huntingdon could be working within three years.

Ash Young, who moved from his native Silicon Valley to Paris in 2017 and later to Huntingdon is the co-founder of Cachengo, which will soon begin assembly of computer components in the former DANA building, Airport Lane, McKenzie.

“I met a girl,” joked Young of why he moved from the bustling area of California to rural west Tennessee.

After working in his father’s business as a young man, serving his country in the U.S. Navy, working for a company that made test equipment for disk drives and later a data protection company, and last as Huawei, a privately-owned Chinese-based computer, where he worked in research and development, he started his own company, Cachengo.

The company makes several products, but the most promising is cost-effective, compact, memory dense, and energy-efficient memory and processing. The components are a revolutionary product to offer EDGE computing, reduce latency in computer transactions. This will help the world move forward with 5G cell service and speed the data transfer between data-hungry self-driving cars, which process as much as two terabytes of data each day. Cachengo’s processors and storage can be placed in traditional data racks for local or cloud computing, on utility poles for 5G and other data transfers, or on the firewall of an automobile, which are just a few of the applications.

Components for the product will be sourced internationally and assembled in McKenzie in the initial phases. The products will be shipped from the Airport Lane location. Locally, the company needs assemblers, software developers and sales and marketing. Presently, the company has 40 persons working from Young’s home in Huntingdon. Operations will soon move to the McKenzie industrial park.

He hopes Bethel University students will take the opportunity to work short shifts to supplement their income. He also hopes to recruit and train some area college students to become software developers.

According to the information of cachengo.com, “Businesses were dominated by different operating system platforms just 20 years ago: Windows NT owned the average sales and marketing organization, Netware was typically used in finance and operations, and Unix was almost always found in the engineering departments. Companies needed a way to share information across different departments and the use of file translation software on every client was cumbersome and expensive. These challenges created the opportunity for a new class of Network Attached Storage (NAS) to be born. The initial solutions were expensive, large, and consisted of multiple rack mountable parts. Ash saw this and felt things could become more mainstream if the appliances were all-in-one, utilized a more open source approach to the operating system and could leverage more commodity components. This quickly became the recipe for modern Enterprise and Cloud-based storage systems.

Today, storage systems have become fairly complex as they try to meet the needs of cloud computing. While the fundamental building blocks are the same, the workload has increased tremendously, which requires a different way of doing things that doesn’t require the ecosystem to be radically changed.

“What we did was relatively simple; but it was so simple and so obvious that no one else really bothered to do it. Just as the economic climate for components had shifted 20 years earlier, the climate now allowed Cachengo to migrate from a single CPU complex to placing a CPU onto each drive. By doing this, we found a reduction in latency and an increase in performance, but also significantly (10X) reduction in both CAPEX and OPEX. When we say “significantly”, we mean by an order of 10. That was simply too significant to ignore. So, we started to assemble prototypes and give demonstrations of our conception at events such as Mobile World Congress (MWC) and at Open Networking Summit (ONS) in early 2018. No one really expected to get excited about storage; but all of that quickly changed.

Some challenges exist to his plans. Those include the lack of hotels in the area, lack of adequate apartments and houses, and other infrastructure such as high-speed internet.