Fungible announced a significant upgrade to its Fungible Storage Cluster (FSC) software with FSC 4.0, leveraging the Fungible DPU to deliver workload-centric block storage and empower data center cloudification. The Fungible Storage Cluster is an all-flash NVMe over TCP disaggregated storage platform.
Fungible announced a significant upgrade to its Fungible Storage Cluster (FSC) software with FSC 4.0, leveraging the Fungible DPU to deliver workload-centric block storage and empower data center cloudification. The Fungible Storage Cluster is an all-flash NVMe over TCP disaggregated storage platform.
Storage Driven by the DPU
This major release delivers the Fungible DPU to the host by introducing the Fungible Storage Initiator enabling NVMe/TCP offload at the host along with line-speed data security. The Fungible Storage Initiator accelerates workloads and offloads NVMe/TCP from CPUs, allowing servers to focus on the application while FSC deals with protocol processing and storage virtualization. Last year, San Diego Supercomputer Center validated the benefits of the Fungible Storage Initiator.
Fungible developed the Fungible’s DPU architecture based on what type of micro-architecture it would take to process data-centric workloads while providing the highest possible performance. The Fungible DPU runs on FunOS, a purpose-built operating system that supports programming for writing data-centric applications in standard ANSI-C. Additionally, with the Fungible Storage Cluster, Fungible has built software stacks for storage and networking used in powerful scale-out storage systems.
Fungible FSC 4.0
In addition to the Fungible Storage Initiator, FSC 4.0 delivers new software features for both new and existing customers. FSC has the highest performance network erasure coding (EC), an alternative to RAID and replication schemes, in the market.
Fungible’s high-performance network erasure coding (EC) is available starting with a cluster as small as three FS1600 storage nodes. The FSC 4.0 release does this by introducing the EC 2+1 volume type, which delivers the efficiency of erasure coding, spreading volume data across as few as three storage nodes. This configuration is beneficial for disaggregating storage.
According to Fungible’s VP of Product, Toby Owen;
“Storage consumers want an elastic block storage experience defined by the ability to create volumes tuned to their workloads, either manually or programmatically, while abstracting the storage infrastructure itself. Storage administrators want to offer a cloud-like experience while minimizing the systems they manage. The efficiency and durability of EC 2+1 erasure coding in FSC 4.0 is attractive for edge data centers that are space-constrained. It allows organizations to minimize their total number of systems and avoid storage silos and islands of performance. This will empower infrastructure professionals to accelerate data center scale on their terms.”
Data protection requirements are very specific to each workload, and many applications can provide data protection services above the storage layer. With the FSC 4.0 release, Fungible adds a feature of a single-replicated RF1 volume. This feature combines the performance of raw NVMe storage with compression and encryption data services. Now, storage volumes can be created to offer the benefits of managed storage without the potential unnecessary overhead of durability at the storage layer, allowing customers to make the most of their storage investment. All the volume types corresponding to the various workloads can coexist in the same FSC cluster.
Final Thoughts
We’ve been working on a review with Fungible over the last several weeks. The design of the system is very impressive, which ranges from the array itself to the DPUs. More than that though is the software, which continues to grow in capabilities.
There’s little doubt that next-generation data transport will look very different than the traditional SAN that the enterprise is used to. DPUs have tremendous potential and bring so much efficiency to the shared storage equation, whether Fungible or competing technologies, that organizations definitely need to take note and follow the technology closely.
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