Data processing unit (DPU) startup Fungible has launched a Storage Initiator card supporting NVMe/TCP and says it makes deploying NVMe/TCP effortless in existing datacentres.
The card is the latest member of its Fungible Storage Cluster product range and is claimed to deliver the world’s fastest and most efficient implementation of NVMe/TCP. It uses Fungible’s S1 DPU chip and, Fungible says, enables the benefits of pooled storage without sacrificing performance.
Eric Hayes, Fungible CEO, said: “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 revolutionise the economics of deploying flash storage in scale-out implementations.”
The company says it offers technology, managed by Fungible’s Composer, to unlock the capacity stranded in silos by disaggregating these resources into pools, and composing them on-demand to meet the dynamic resourcing needs of modern applications.
There are FC200, FC100 and FC50 storage initiator cards, and a single FC200 card is capable of delivering 2.5 million IOPS to its host. The SI cards are available in a standard PCIe form factor, manage all NVMe/TCP communication for the host, and in turn present native NVMe devices to the host operating system using standard NVMe drivers. The cards offload the processing of NVMe/TCP from the host, freeing up approximately 30 per cent of the general-purpose CPU cores to run applications.
This approach enables interoperability with operating systems that do not natively support NVMe/TCP, such as Windows, older Linux kernels and macOS.
Fungible claims that, when paired with a Fungible FS1600 storage server node or other non-Fungible NVMe/TCP storage targets, the SI cards enhance the performance, security and efficiency of those environments, as well as providing the world’s highest-performance implementation of standards-based NVMe/TCP.
It also says these cards allow datacentre compute servers to get rid of all local storage — even boot drives — allowing the complete disaggregation of storage from servers.
In the last few days NetApp announced NVMe/TCP, followed yesterday by VMware and Dell, and now today Lightbits and Fungible. It’s becoming an open house party.
