Fungible Advances Data Center Economics by Simplifying Secure Disaggregation of High-Performance Scale-Out Flash Storage Using Open Standards

Fungible Inc. announced it is adding new capabilities and products to its Fungible Storage Cluster product portfolio. The Fungible Storage Initiator (SI) cards allow standard servers to access NVMe over TCP (NVMe/TCP) storage targets using the world’s fastest and most efficient implementation of NVMe/TCP, provide enhancements to the security and usability of the entire data platform, and make deploying NVMe/TCP effortless in existing data centers.

Data centers have harbored inefficiencies for decades. Silos of resources create stranded capacity, while at the same time creating overhead for managing each silo independently. While silos have proliferated due to the unique needs of each application, workloads have also grown more and more data-centric. This has fueled the accelerated growth of infrastructure spending, while generalized hardware has become less effective at meeting the needs of these modern workloads.

Fungible has answered these challenges by creating the world’s most powerful Data Processing Unit, the Fungible DPU™, a new category of processor purpose-built for data-centric workloads. Fungible offers technology 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. While pooled storage has long been an answer to eliminating local storage silos, it is typically implemented at the expense of performance. This tradeoff is no longer necessary.  Built to run on standard NVMe/TCP, The Fungible Storage Cluster enables the benefits of pooled storage without sacrificing performance. Now, with the announcement of Fungible’s Storage Initiator, NVMe/TCP is even easier to adopt, easier to deploy, and even more powerful.

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 a single FC200 card is capable of delivering a record-breaking 2.5 million IOPS to its host. These cards, and the Fungible Storage Cluster, are managed by Fungible Composer™, which orchestrates the composition of disaggregated data center resources on demand.

Fungible’s SI solution offers a hardware-accelerated, high-performance approach to disaggregating storage from servers. The SI cards are available in a standard PCIe form-factor, allowing effortless deployment into existing servers. The cards manage all  NVMe/TCP communication for the host and in turn present native NVMe devices to the host operating system using standard NVMe drivers. This approach enables interoperability with operating systems that do not natively support NVMe/TCP.  When paired with a Fungible FS1600 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.

 The benefits of the Fungible Storage Initiator solution include:

• Simplicity – Allows modern data center compute servers to finally get rid of ALL local storage, even boot drives, allowing the complete disaggregation of storage from servers.
• Security – Seamless, high-performance, multi-tenant encryption of data from the moment it is first transmitted over the network through its lifetime retention on the Fungible storage target.
• Flexibility – Expands the usability of NVMe/TCP to a broader set of customer environments, even those without native NVMe/TCP support.
• Savings and Performance – Offloads the processing of NVMe/TCP from the host, freeing up approximately 30% of the general-purpose CPU cores to run applications. This provides significant cost and environmental savings to customers.

“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, 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.”

“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.”