Fujitsu gets cosy with Vexata

Vexata has plugged into a big enterprise sales channel in the USA and Canada via a deal with Fujitsu to resell its bleeding edge NVMe storage arrays.

The companies will jointly develop reference architectures for customer proof of concept projects in a new Fujitsu Solutions Lab in Silicon Valley. Fujitsu will pitch Vexata arrays into the financial services, bio-medical, retail and manufacturing sectors.

Vexata must surely be pleased with this prospect while Fujitsu gets some tech glamour in its Solutions Lab. If it works out Fujitsu may extend the deal worldwide.

Unboxing Vexata

Vexata storage is scale-up and scale-out and is available as an appliance, as an array with IBM’s Spectrum Scale (PDF), or as software running on commodity servers and switches.

The company claims 10x performance and efficiency improvements at a fraction of the cost of existing all-flash storage products. 

Vexata arrays are not your average run-of-the-mill all-flash storage arrays. They use a 3-stage accelerated internal architecture that’s a long way from  traditional dual-controller design.

Vexata array architecture

Vexata’s VX-100 box is a 6U enclosure with two active:active controllers using either up to 64 NVMe SSDs or Optane SSDs. It connects to accessing servers, using up to 16 x 32Gbit/s Fibre Channel ports or 16 x 40GitbE NVMe over Fabric ports.

Effective capacity is 432TB usable for the VX-100F and 19TB-38TB for the Optane-based VX-100M.

Performance numbers are 7 million IOPs (8KB 70 per cent read/30 per cent write) with a 35-90μs latency (flash) or 40μs (Optane). Bandwidth is 70GB/sec (50GB/sec read; 20GB/sec write). 

These are hot array boxes compared to Fujitsu’s ETERNUS dual-controller arrays. Their performance is comparable to Fujitsu’s top-end multi-controller ETERNUS DX8900 S4 with its 10 million IOPS (8KB Random Read Miss).