KIOXIA’s KumoScale software now put on UNH-IOL NVMe-oF integrator’s list

KIOXIA America (formerly Toshiba Memory America), the U.S.-based subsidiary of KIOXIA Corp., announced this week that its KumoScale storage software with NVM Express over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) v3.11 has been added to The University of New Hampshire InterOperability Laboratory’s (UNH-IOL) official Integrator’s List. 

In order to be considered for inclusion on the list, technologies must undergo conformance testing performed by the UNH-IOL through laboratory tests or during an NVMe plugfest. Successful completion of this testing provides a level of assurance that the product being tested will function properly in NVMe-oF environments.

Developed with a strong focus on virtualizing, managing and securing data, the KumoScale software suite provides a feature-rich storage abstraction for containers and virtual machines. It delivers secure flash access, API access to orchestration frameworks, among other capabilities, and takes advantage of the unique performance characteristics of NVMe SSDs. 

KumoScale software was the first storage software technology to be granted NVMe-oF certification by the UNH-IOL, and KIOXIA America continues to submit new releases of the software suite for certification. 

“Ensuring the interoperability of technologies with the NVMe standards is at the heart of what we do,” noted David Woolf, senior engineer, Datacenter Technologies, UNH-IOL. “KumoScale block storage software was the first of its kind to be listed on the NVMe-oF Integrator’s List back in 2017. We commend KIOXIA for their continued software innovations and for making NVMe-oF more deployable in cloud data centers.”

EXTEN Technologies and AIC to deliver NVMe-oF storage offerings optimized for supercomputing

AIC and EXTEN Technologies have partnered to provide a dense and scalable, software-defined NVMe-oF solution with record breaking performance, advanced management, provisioning, and RAID data protection services. This disaggregated storage based on the AIC Shark server provides industry leading price performance for HPC, analytics and ML/AI applications.

The AIC Shark server is ideal for dense computation, networking, and storage scalability. Four AMD EPYC processors manage storage processing for up to 24 local NVMe drives in its 2U enclosure. The AIC Shark server is an ideal scale-up (add JBOFs) and scale-out (add servers) platform for high-bandwidth shared storage applications that have a variety of data processing requirements.

The EXTEN HyperDynamic datapath running on Shark nodes creates a powerful data processing system with less than one microsecond of software overhead. This enables blistering performance with the lowest latency available. With simple striping, the 2U system achieves bandwidth of over 80GB/s. EXTEN supports both RDMA and TCP in parallel for maximum flexibility.

The EXTEN HyperDynamic software management suite offers a single REST interface to manage a cluster of NVMe-oF targets. This allows administrators to provision and manage the AIC Shark with the simplicity of a single machine, while maintaining the shared-nothing, linear scalability of NVMe-oF block storage performance. The EXTEN management framework is standards-based which ensures future-proof compatibility. Together, EXTEN software and the AIC Shark provide a perfect framework for implementing any reconfigurable, software-defined NVMe-oF solution.

Utilizing standard MPIO and Linux drivers, the Shark solution provides a robust storage platform built on standard tools that provides fault tolerance at both the target and drive level. EXTEN software ensures high performance resilience features including mirroring and dual parity RAID within each Shark node and volume replication across nodes without using client-side resources such as CPU, memory and I/O bandwidth.

KIOXIA’s KumoScale software offers cross-domain volume replication; boosts data protection with disaggregated NVMe flash storage

KIOXIA America Inc. (formerly Toshiba Memory America), announced that the v3.11 of its KumoScale storage software with NVM Express over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) now includes cross-domain volume replication. With this new feature, KumoScale offers data protection at the storage layer while maintaining NVMe flash performance and low latency.

KIOXIA’s KumoScale storage software makes flash storage accessible over a data center network – allowing data centers to run more efficiently. To address the inefficiencies associated with direct-attached storage (DAS) architectures, KumoScale software disaggregates high-performance NVMe SSDs from compute nodes and shares them across a network infrastructure as network-attached resources.

KumoScale software is a high-performance block storage software suite for on-premise clouds. Combining the speed and responsiveness of born-in-the-cloud software with the staying power of one of the world's largest flash memory makers, KumoScale software uses NVMe technology to enable “flash-as–a-service."

Many databases and applications require their storage systems to provide resilience against drive failure and across arbitrary failure domains. These domains can include racks, aisles – or entire data centers. KumoScale software’s cross-domain replication makes data protection available and easy to flexibly deploy.

KumoScale software’s data center-level approach to resilience against drive failure or network partition allows users to specify arbitrary failure domains using tags. When provisioning volumes, KumoScale software will create volume replicas across multiple KumoScale appliances located in different failure domains for rack-level resiliency. This addresses both equipment failure and maintenance downtime scenarios, and can be provided to only those applications or storage classes that require it.

KIOXIA designed KumoScale software to deliver NVMe flash as a service – enabling cost-effective, networked flash performance close to that of local (in-server) NVMe SSDs.

“Cloud-native applications typically offer data protection by replicating shards at the database layer,” noted Joel Dedrick, vice president and general manager, networked storage software, KIOXIA America, Inc. “However, in our experience, few customers are 100% cloud native – there are always a few legacy applications that depend on the storage layer to provide data protection. KumoScale software’s cross-domain volume replication is designed to provide the flexibility to protect data for entrenched applications while not forcing a one-size-fits-all solution across a company’s workloads.”