Wistron and Kalray Unveil Furio1200 24 SSDs NVMe-oF Based Storage Node Appliance

Wistron Corporation and Kalray Corporation announced the availability of Furio1200, a 24-flash-drive NVMe-oF based storage node appliance, integrating Kalray’s NVMe-oF K200 storage adapter, powered by its MPPA Coolidge processor, and Wistron LYMMA chassis.

Furio1200 is a type of hyper-fast disaggregated storage solution delivering high throughput and reliability. It is a solution for cloud service providers and enterprises running applications with intensive AI and data analytics workloads as well as to optimize their next gen storage.

Data centers are undergoing a important revolution due to the explosion of usages, the surge of data to be processed and the growth of the number of machines to be managed to support this growth. Storage is one major bottleneck of the increasing performance needs in data centers, driving the introduction of SSDs with fast communication protocols such as NVMe and NVMe-oF.

Furio1200, as an NVMe-oF all flash JBOF (Just Bunch of Flash) appliance, offers a solution to massively scale up and increase performance of existing data centers. In addition, it makes disaggregation a reality, by allowing compute resources to be separated from storage resources while optimizing performance of the overall system and re-use.

Eric Baissus, president and CEO, Kalray, declared: “Together with Wistron, one of the world’s largest manufacturers of data center servers, we are very proud of our contribution to development of the Furio1200 solution. We expect this solution to become a game changer in the industry.”

William Lin, president, enterprise business group, Wistron Technologies, Wistron Corporation, declared: “We are enthused about Furio1200 availability. There is a strong need for more efficient and scalable storage solutions in the market. It’s the perfect fit for data intensive applications such as AI, data analytics or IoT, for increasing performance of existing datacenters as well as addressing the growing markets of hyper converged infrastructure and on-premises enterprise data centers.”

PCIe K200 Coolidge

Whereas most storage platforms run standard x86 process, Furio is powered by Kalray MPPA Coolidge intelligent processor. The processor has been designed to manage in parallel a huge flow of data in real time and removes the traditional bottleneck in running intensive data services such as data protection on intense workloads. This results in performance improvements and a reduction of the workload on the servers connected to Furio1200, freeing expensive resources for data center users.

It will be available for PoC first quarter of this year, ad targets volume production by mid 2021, first customer trials being planned in the coming weeks.

Furio1200 is a 2U chassis using Gen3 PCIe fabric, featuring chassis management with redundant and power provision and is able to host 24 U.2 NVMe SSDs and multiple PCIe K200 Coolidge – based smart storage adapter solutions. It delivers more than 12 million IO/s within a range of 20 to 50µs latency and a global throughput of up to 72GB/s whilst supporting in parallel data protection services such as erasure coding.

It integrates Kalray K200 cards running NVMe-oF Kalray software, which has been certified by the University of New Hampshire InterOperability Laboratory (UNH-IOL), an independent testing provider of standard conformance solutions and multi-vendor interoperability.

One additional specialty of Furio1200 is the seamless support of the NVMe-oF over RDMA (RDMA over Converged Ethernet or RoCE) or over TCP protocol standards. This dual-persona capability brings the flexibility required in evolving data centers, minimizing investment while maximizing the return and lifetime of the Furio1200-based infrastructure.

In addition, the processors integrated into Kalray cards are programmable and are provided with an open SDK. This makes Furio1200 an evolving, customizable and future proof solution. New software releases are planned with additional features such as KVS, in-line security services offloading (e.g. SSL-TLS or IPSEC), computational storage, and AI analytics as well cluster storage support.