FMS: Kalray Wins Most Innovative Technology Award

Kalray SA has won the coveted FMS award for most innovative technology with its Flashbox powered by its DPU processor.

FMS is a flash memory conference and exposition, held at the Santa Clara Convention Center, CA. The FMS awards represent an industry recognition of innovation that Kalray’s Flashbox solution brings to the market.

“Designing an enterprise storage array today can benefit from a disaggregated architecture that can address performance at the highest levels and capacity expansion in a cost-effective manner.“ said Jay Kramer, chairman of the awards program and president, Network Storage Advisors, Inc. “We are proud to recognize the collaboration between Viking and Kalray which provides an integrated storage solution delivering several millions of IO/s using 12x 100Gb/s network interface connections distributed across 6 DPUs-based acceleration cards.“ 

Flashbox is a new concept of AFA, based on Kalray’s MPPA DPU processor (Data Processing Unit) and co-designed with Viking Enterprise Solutions.

Whereas most advanced AFA solutions currently use multiple adapter cards with power-hungry and expensive CPUs (x86) that run storage services, the concept of Flashbox is to run all of the critical functions of a disaggregated storage appliance on a single chip: the MPPA DPU. This solution delivers integration, speed, scalability and performance at an affordable cost. Thanks to Flashbox, data centers can reduce critical metrics such as $/IO/s and IO/s/watt.

“It is a great honor to win a Flash Memory Summit award for our innovative concept of Flashbox AFA,” said Kalray CEO, Éric Baissus. “We strongly believe that wide adoption of NVMe requires adopting new innovative approaches. This is Flashbox. Flashbox is a unique high-performance, low power, cost-effective, high-available new gen of storage appliances based on Kalray’s DPU technology. Powered by our Smart Storage Acceleration Card, Flashbox allows data center customers to disaggregate their flash tier while maintaining the same performance of local NVMe, thereby optimizing both flash performance and capacity across the compute tier of their data center.”

Flashbox benefits from fast interfaces and low power consumption. It can deliver performance figures using 12x100Gb/s network interface connections distributed across 6xK200-LP cards and is based on market standards such as Storage Performance Development Kit (SPDK), NVMe/TCP or RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCEv1/v2).

Flashbox is a 2U array, with support for 24 U.2 NVMe SSDs. Flashbox JBOF (Just A Bunch of Flash) replaces x86 servers of traditional storage nodes with Kalray PCIe cards (K200-LP) which incorporate the Kalray DPU. The HA Flashbox has 2xViking Enterprise Solutions fabric modules, each module has a PCIe switch network and supports 3xPCIe add-in card slots (half-height, half-length). Each DPU PCIe add-in card can run all the critical functions and data services required of a storage appliance. Flashbox can scale from 2 to 6 of the K200-LP PCIe add-in cards allowing the end customer to scale performance independently of capacity of the array. This solution is lower cost and lower power from a traditional NVMe storage array.

Additionally, users will be able to take advantage of current and future data services integrated into the solution software stack such as data reduction (compression or de-dupe), data availability (RAID or erasure encoding) or data security (encryption). This will further enhance critical business metrics by offloading these services from the data center compute tiers. Flashbox offers the SDS solution by abstracting and disaggregating the flash tier from the compute tier.