Flashbox™ is a new generation of high-performance, low-power, high-availability storage array built around Kalray’s DPU processor
San Clara, California – USA & Grenoble – France, August 4, 2022 – Kalray (Euronext Growth Paris: ALKAL), pioneer in a new generation of processors and accelerator boards, specializing in intelligent data processing at both the “Cloud” and “Edge” level, is very pleased to announce that it has won the very coveted at the international “Flash Memory Summit” exhibition, rewarding the most innovative technology.
“Flash Memory Summit” (or FMS) is the world’s largest exhibition dedicated to Flash memories. It is held at the Santa Clara Convention Center in California, United States. This FMS Award (“FMS Awards”) represents great industry recognition for the innovation brought to the storage market by Kalray’s Flashbox™.
“Enterprise storage array design can now benefit from a disaggregated architecture that meets the highest performance requirements and growing capacity needs, all at a very competitive cost”, said Jay Kramer, Chairman of the FMS Awards Program and President of Network Storage Advisors Inc. “We are proud to reward the collaboration between Viking and Kalray which provides this storage solution, based on Kalray DPUs, capable of reaching millions of IOPS.1 with 12x 100 Gb/s of network interfaces spread over six acceleration cards. »
Flashbox™ is a new concept of all-flash storage array (“All-Flash-Array”), based on Kalray’s MPPA® DPU (“Data Processing Unit”) processor and co-designed with Viking Enterprise Solutions.
While most advanced storage arrays currently use multiple cards with expensive and power-hungry (x86) CPU processors, the Flashbox™ concept is to perform all the critical functions of a disaggregated storage solution on a single chip: the Kalray MPPA® DPU. This solution offers an unprecedented level of integration, speed, scalability and performance, at a very competitive cost. Using Flashbox™, data centers can reduce key performance indicators such as dollars per IOP or IOPs per Watt ($/IOP and IOPs/Watt).
“It is a great honor to win this Flash Memory Summit award for our innovative Flashbox™ storage array concept,” declared Éric Baissus, Chairman of the Management Board of Kalray. “ We firmly believe that the widespread adoption of NVMe Flash drive technology2 requires the use of new innovative approaches such as the Flashbox™. The Flashbox™ is a new generation of storage array, unique, high performance, low consumption, with a very competitive cost and high availability, based on Kalray’s DPU technology. Built around our storage accelerator card, Flashbox™ allows data center customers to de-aggregate their storage while maintaining the same performance as a locally attached NVMe Flash drive, maximizing both performance and storage capacity Flash from their data centers. »
A unique concept on the market today, Flashbox™ benefits from ultra-fast interfaces and low energy consumption. It can thus provide unprecedented performance and is based on standard market standards such as SPDK (“Storage Performance Development Kit”), NVMe/TCP or RoCEv1/v2 (“RDMA Over Converged Ethernet”).
Flashbox™ is a 2U high storage bay, which can accommodate up to 24 NVMe U.2 SSD flash drives. Flashbox™ JBOF (“Just A Bunch of Flash”) replaces storage node servers based on traditional x86 architectures with Kalray PCIe cards (K200-LP) integrating the Kalray DPU. The high availability Flashbox™ has two Viking Enterprise Solutions modules, each module has a PCIe network switch and can accommodate 3 PCIe expansion cards (half-height, half-length dimension). This solution is less expensive and consumes much less than a traditional NVMe storage array.
In addition, users will be able to take advantage of storage services, intensive in data manipulation, integrated into a software stack of the solution: Data compression and deduplication, data availability (RAID or “Erasure Coding”) or security/ encryption of this data. This further improves key performance indicators by offloading these services from data center compute servers. Flashbox™ thus offers the ideal SDS (Software Defined Storage) solution by making it possible to disaggregate the storage of the calculation servers.
ABOUT KALRAY
Kalray (Euronext Growth Paris – FR0010722819 – ALKAL) is a “fabless” semiconductor company, leader in a new generation of processors, specialized in intelligent data processing both at the “Cloud” and “Edge” (at network periphery). At the forefront of innovation, Kalray’s teams have developed a unique technology as well as the associated solutions allowing its customers to best exploit the full potential of a world that is now based on massive, disparate and ubiquitous data.
Thanks to their patented “manycore” architecture, Kalray’s intelligent MPPA® processors are able to manage in parallel – and without bottlenecks – multiple data streams, thus allowing applications exploiting massive quantities of data to be more intelligent. , more efficient and energy efficient. Kalray’s offer includes processors, acceleration cards with their software environment and complete systems, allowing its customers to design the best solutions in high growth sectors such as modern data centers, 5G, AI, Edge Computing, Autonomous Vehicles and more.
A spin-off from the CEA founded in 2008, Kalray’s investors include Alliance Venture (Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi), Safran, NXP Semiconductors, CEA and Bpifrance. Kalray is technology, expertise, passion to always offer more: more for a smart world, more for the planet, more for our customers and developers. www.kalrayinc.com
ABOUT Viking Enterprise Solutions
Viking Enterprise Solutions is a division of Sanmina Corporation and provides advanced data center solutions, including memory servers and solid state drives, JBOD storage systems and other products for storage and various data center needs. Viking Enterprise Solutions products have won numerous awards. They are designed to be integrated into OEM, integrator, and data center products, reducing development and operating costs while improving time to market. More information at www.vikingenterprisesolutions.com.
1 IOPS is the number of input/output operations per second. It is a performance metric used to characterize computer storage devices.
2 NVM Express is an interface specification that allows a computer to access a storage device through a PCI Express bus.
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