Kalray K200-LP Acceleration Card Optimized for NVMe/NVMe-oF-Based Storage Solutions and Data Centers

Kalray Corp. unveils its K200-LP acceleration card.

It is a member of the company‘s programmable multi-purpose acceleration card family, based on its MPPA processor, and offering performance and targeting the NVMe-based storage market as its first implementation.

The explosion of data, driven by demanding services and applications using AI and data analytics, is putting pressure on cloud and edge data center’s networking and storage to feed the demanding compute intensive resources. The primary needs are to reduce latency, enhance bandwidth and IO/s ⁽¹⁾ performance as well as offloading host CPUs, at best cost.

Data centers are looking for solutions that enable performance, low power, cost effectiveness and openness to scale and match demand on data availability. The K200-LP acceleration card is the company’s solution to address these demands for their data center customers.

Eric Baissus, president and CEO, Kalray, said: “We are proud to unveil our new K200-LP acceleration card, based on our MPPA processor. This family of Ethernet/PCIe acceleration cards are natively capable of managing multiple workloads with no bottleneck to enable smarter, more efficient, and energy-wise applications on cloud and edge data centers. To address the new gen of storage array solutions for Cloud and Edge, K200-LP is a game changer solution in terms of performance per watt and per dollar.“

To improve and optimize overall IT infrastructures, the industry has moved towards disaggregated storage. Put simply, separating compute resources and storage resources.

Most advanced AFA solutions today use multiple adapter cards around a x86 that runs storage services. The company manages to run all the critical functions of a disaggregated storage appliance on one single chip: the firm’s MPPA processor. Advanced Data Processing Units (DPU) like MPPA and associated acceleration cards can run, efficiently and on a cost-optimized manner vs. traditional x86, new protocols such as NVMe and NVMe-oF to access and unleash the full capability of SSDs wherever they are located in the data center as if there were locally attached.

Whereas the industry has defined a new NVMe protocol to support the latest gen of ultra-fast storage devices, existing traditional technologies are not capable of exposing the full capability of NVMe-based SSDs. The K200-LP storage card has been built to support those breaking through data protocols. Based on the firm’s MPPA’s processor, it is also a solution for storage array appliance makers and cloud service providers, to build their next gen of storage appliances in terms of performance per watt per dollar.

The K200-LP acceleration card is a low-profile, 2x100GbE, PCIe Gen4 card that can deliver more than 2 million IO/s and 12GB/s per card (both RoCE and TCP) with a latency of 30 μs. It has been developed by the company and is manufactured by Taiwanese Wistron Corp., a large manufacturer of electronic cards and data center servers.

The K200-LP smart storage card and associated tools are available.

⁽¹⁾ IO/s is the numbers of IO/s and is a performance measurement used to characterize computer storage devices.