French Kalray Demonstrated NVMe Direct SSD Controller

Kalray SA, provider of acceleration solutions for data centers, announced at last Interop the availability of its NVME Direct storage smartNIC prototype.

Based on Kalray’s smartNIC KONIC-80, equipped with the company’s Bostan high-speed I/O processor, the new solution meets challenging requirements for remote storage controllers as it improves overall latency by reading and writing data directly between the SSD and the smartNIC instead of going through the host, thus avoiding several memory copies.

The company demonstrated the device at Interop, Las Vegas, Mandalay Bay Convention Center, booth 350.

Kalray’s industry solution delivers these smartNIC storage functions at sub-30W power consumption, while having the capability to simultaneously implement any type of processing required in storage applications such as encryption, compression and erasure coding – all in standard C/C++ software.

The company is planning to introduce a complete storage smartNIC solution supporting NVMe over Fabric over RoCE (RDMA over Converged Ethernet), providing up 3.2 million IO/s at 4kB data with 2x40GbE, by the end of the year.

“Bostan’s unique architecture provides high computing performance with real time processing and low power consumption,” said Eric Baissus, Kalray CEO. “Our Bostan high-speed I/O processor is getting strong traction in the storage data center market place for various types of applications ranging from erasure coding and encryption offloading, storage smartNICs, and raid card controllers, to storage servers integrating all those functions in one processor.”

Data center storage is going through a profound revolution with the massive introduction of SSDs bringing much lower latency compared to HDDs. On the one hand, SSD usage is putting pressure on the system that didn’t undergo as much stress with HDDs, to decrease the latency in the transport of the data as well as in the controller itself. On the other hand, the pipeline based protocol NVMe, which has been developed to take advantage of the random access property of SSDs, is now well established. NVMe SSD calls for new low latency controllers capable of high IO/s.

The prototype solution shown at Interop is implementing all functions of a smartNIC storage. The NVMe data and commands between the initiator and the target are transported over the Ethernet network. The smartNIC manages the Ethernet termination and processes the NVMe associated data and commands on its 256 programmable cores, where operations such as erasure coding, logical volume management, deduplication or encryption can be implemented at wire speed in software, before going to the network (read) or to the SSD (write), all without host processor involvement.

Bostan high-speed I/O processor has a powerful architecture by connecting high speed I/O interfaces such as 2x40GbE and 2×8-lanes PCIe Gen3 directly to a large matrix of 256 computing cores, 16 system cores, 16 master cores which are all C/C++ programmable and 128 crypto co-processors. It offers a solution for an NVME SSD controller capable of 3.2 million IO/s at 10µs latency with a sub 30-watt power consumption.