Formulus Black Partnering With Nth Generation

Venture-backed start-up Formulus Black Corporation announced that it has teamed with IT consulting and engineering firm Nth Generation Computing, Inc. to deploy ForsaOS into the marketplace, offering those in the hyper-converged infrastructure, HPC and public cloud compute industries with the ability to run all applications entirely in-memory to provide huge gains in compute efficiency.

Suited to solving the needs of enterprises in the financial services, automotive, telecom, energy, university and healthcare industries, ForsaOS will be integrated by Nth Generation as part of a series of HPE-branded servers designed to best meet their customers’ needs. Testing of ForsaOS on a HPE DL380 Gen10 server featuring Intel Xeon Gold 6126 processors, and 24-32GB HPE DDR4-2666 MT/s DIMMs yielded performance from 4.5 to 7.8 million random 4K IO/s with average latencies for writes at 2.8µs and reads at 1.8µs per IOP with CPU utilization below 50% – a level of performance unmatchable by SSD or other I/O-bound technology. The results were achieved running VDBENCH on ForsaOS in host mode (non-virtualized).

“While we understood that by ForsaOS running all applications in memory we would achieve significant gains in compute efficiency, we didn’t expect to see such incredible performance results in terms of execution speed and reduced latency that we saw in testing,” said Lee Solomonson, Nth generation labs manager. “We see ForsaOS as a transformative technology and look forward to offering it in our product portfolio so that we may better help our customers achieve their business goals now and into the future.“

Developed as a software only solution that utilizes DRAM memory as storage while providing all the management tools and features needed to increase effective memory capacity by up to 24x while improving processing speed as much as 450x, ForsaOS enables larger database and analytics workloads to persist and run in memory on commodity hardware without any application modifications. It organizes data for use with any application and OS for a truly platform-agnostic approach. A built-in hypervisor leverages the company’s patented Formulus Bit Markers (FbMs) technology to allow more virtual server instances on standard hardware than conventional hypervisors.

“While storage vendors look to add hyperconverged solutions to move closer to compute, and compute vendors add additional peripheral channels to servers in an attempt to address storage I/O bottlenecks, Formulus Black enables a software-only solution without the negative technical tradeoffs made by other vendors,” said George Crump, lead analyst, Storage Switzerland LLC. “Others who have attempted a similar converged approach have struggled to overcome the technology hurdles that allow both memory and storage to coexist in the memory channel.“

ForsaOS increases cost effectiveness, data security, processing speed and memory capacity without application changes, compression, encryption or added peripherals. The software stack keeps data in persistent memory and is safe against power loss. By identifying and encoding data patterns using algorithms, the software enables more data to be securely persisted in memory while also providing in-memory system backup and restore in minutes instead of hours or days.

“We are pleased to have the opportunity to bring ForsaOS to market by partnering with leading solutions providers like Nth Generation who will be able to deliver tailor-made solutions that satisfy the needs of customers requiring exceptional performance, even when utilizing more-affordable, mid-tier Xeon processors” said Wayne Rickard, chief strategy and marketing officer. “Because we designed the ForsaOS software stack to run any workload in memory without modification on any server, reseller partners and integrators can quickly and easily incorporate it into their product portfolios to deliver solutions that break new ground in satisfying performance-hungry workloads at memory-channel speeds.“

ForsaOS is available as part of Nth Generation’s solutions portfolio.

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March 26, 2019 | Press Release