Silicon Valley-based Fungible, a company aiming to revolutionize the performance, economics, reliability and security of scale-out data centers, has expanded its Fungible Storage Cluster product portfolio. Their new Storage Initiator (SI) cards would allow standard servers to get easy access to NVMe over TCP (NVMe/TCP) storage targets while enabling fast and efficient implementation of NVMe/TCP.
These SI cards would also provide enhancements to the security and utilization of the entire data platform, while making deployment of NVMe/TCP effortless in existing data centers.
“NVMe/TCP is rapidly gaining adoption and is a key driver in storage innovation today,” said Ashish Nadkarni, Group Vice President, Infrastructure Systems, Platforms and Technologies Group at IDC. “It excels in highly demanding and compute-intensive enterprise, cloud and edge data center environments. Companies, such as Fungible, are leveraging NVMe/TCP to deliver the highest throughput, fastest response times and unrivaled economics for all types of workloads.”
Fungible DPU
For decades, data centers have harbored inefficiencies, according to Fungible. Resource silos produce stranded capacity and at the same time generate overheads for autonomous management of each silo. Due to the specific demands of each application, silos grew, but workloads were also more data centered. According to Fungible, this has boosted the fast rise of infrastructure expenditure while widespread hardware is less efficient to fulfill the demands of modern workforces.
Fungible has answered these challenges by creating a powerful Data Processing Unit, the Fungible DPU, a new category of processor purpose-built for data-centric workloads.
Fungible provides technologies for distributing and compiling these resources into pools and silos on demand to satisfy modern applications’ dynamic resource requirements. Although pooled storage is a long-time response to the elimination of local storage silos, it is usually carried out on a performance basis. This compromise is no longer required, says Fungible.
The Fungible Storage Cluster, built to work on standard NVMe/TCP, would provide the benefits of shared storage without losing its speed. According to Fungible, NVMe/TCP is now easier to accept, easier to install and much stronger with introduction of Fungible’s Storage Initiator.
Server Storage
The Fungible Storage Initiator solution is delivered on Fungible’s FC200, FC100 and FC50 cards. Each of these cards is powered by the S1 Fungible DPU and one FC200 card can offer a record of 2,5 million IOPS to its host. The Fungible Composer, which coordinates the construction of disaggregated data center resources on request, manages these cards and the Fungible Storage Cluster.
Fungible’s SI solution would provide a high-performance hardware-accelerated method for disassembling server storage. The SI Cards may be deployed in an existing server with a typical PCIe form factor. The cards handle all NVMe/TCP communication for the host and, in turn, use conventional NVMe drivers to display Native NVMe devices to the host operating system.
It allows for compatibility with operating systems who do not support NVMe/TCP in native terms. When coupled with a Fungible FS1600 or other NVMe/TCP non-Fungible storage targets, SI cards increase environmental performance, security and efficiency, and offer the best performance worldwide of the standard-based NVMe/TCP implementation.
To sum up, the benefits of the Fungible Storage Initiator solution would include:
- Simplicity – Allows the contemporary data center calculation servers to remove ALL local storage, including boot disks, enabling full server storage disintegration.
- Security – Seamless, high-performance, multi-tenant, data encryption when it initially transmits to the Fungible storage destination over the network via its lifetime retention.
- Flexibility – Expands NVMe/TCP usefulness to a wider range of custodial applications, even without NVMe/TCP capability.
- Savings and Performance – Offloads NVMe/TCP processing on the host, releasing “roughly 30%” of the overall CPU core applications. This provides clients with substantial financial and environmental savings.
“With our high-performance and low-latency implementation, Fungible’s disaggregated NVMe/TCP solution becomes a game changer. Over the last five years, we have designed our products to support NVMe/TCP natively to revolutionize the economics of deploying flash storage in scale-out implementations,” said Eric Hayes, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Fungible. “In addition to industry leading performance, our solutions offer more value and the highest levels of security, compression, efficiency, durability and ease of use. At Fungible, we continue to disrupt the traditional rigid models by disaggregating compute and storage using available industry standards like NVMe/TCP.”
