VMworld: Attala Systems Launched Composable Storage Infrastructure

Attala Systems, Inc. announced its Composable Storage Infrastructure product, which showcased at VMworld 2017 US in Las Vegas, NV.

The VMworld showcase will also mark the first time an NVMe over Fabric (NVMe-oF) solution has been demonstrated with VMware ESXi. The product utilizes Intel FPGAs and NVMe flash storage to provide performance for cloud service providers, e-commerce sites, MSPs, telco providers, financial services, and real-time digital enterprises. The company, which came out of stealth mode earlier this month at the 2017 Flash Memory Summit, where it won the Best of Show award in the NVMe storage, NVMe-oF adapter, and software categories.

“The launch of the Attala Composable Storage Infrastructure marks the start of a significant change in how storage is used for cloud and real-time analytics“, said Taufik Ma, CEO, Attala. “We have used our award-winning FPGA-based fabric to deliver breakthrough in predictable storage latency, IO/s, agility and cost efficiency. When combined with our SPARA automation and management software, the result is a storage system with high and predictable performance, and extremely simple management.”

The company’s product utilizes a scale-out fabric running on standard 25, 40 or 50GbE  to interconnect a data center’s servers and data nodes. By focusing on scale-out cloud storage and using an FPGA-based fabric, the firm’s team was able to eliminate legacy storage management layers. The resulting product provides over 10 million IO/s per scale-out node, and latencies of 16μs, all with pricing per gigabyte lower than competitive solutions, and in a storage system with redundancy including dual-ported NVMe SSDs. The result is an adaptable storage infrastructure that is essentially an elastic block storage (EBS) solution ‘on steroids’.

“By reducing the NVMe protocols into an FPGA Attala’s technology promises to quickly democratize the ultra-low latency performance of NVMe over fabrics.” said Howard Marks, chief scientist, DeepStorage.net. “With Ethernet connected NVMEoF JBOFs system architects can build composable infrastructures assigning NVMe resources directly to hosts or to software-defined storage controllers, dynamically via their favorite orchestration engine like Puppet, Chef, or Ansible. We look forward to testing the Attala Systems Composable Storage Infrastructure product in the future.“

The company’s fabric includes the model HNA host PCIe adapters which provide hardware emulation of NVMe SSDs, allowing the solution to expose pooled resources as virtual SSDs (vSSDs). The host OS, hypervisor or driver treat these vSSDs as actual SSDs using standard, in-box NVMe drivers, allowing operation with any OS, any hypervisor, and bare-metal provisioning software. These capabilities are complimented by an automated orchestration layer, where the fabric dynamically and securely attaches volumes from storage resources from across the network directly to bare-metal servers, VMs or containers. The form’s systems solution does not require host agents or software, simplifying deployment and maintenance of the system across heterogeneous environments.

Company’s composable storage infrastructure product will be available in 3Q17.

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Start-Up Profile: Attala Systems
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by Jean Jacques Maleval | 2017.08.11 | News