Pliops unveils its Data Processing Unit

Pliops, a emerging player in data processing unit (DPU) segment, unveiled recently its first product the XDP for eXtreme Data Processor. As data volume became more and more significant with the need for fast access and processing the requirement to think about a new model got even more a top reality. Founded in 2017 by Aryeh Mergi and Uri Beitler, the firm got $150M of funding in 4 rounds with some famous institutional and financial companies.

Beyond what we see with CPU and GPU, the main idea is to add a specific data processing component within the architecture connected as PCIe card to boost this data processing need but also at the same time offload theses tasks from the CPU. I worked at SGI almost 30 years ago and this is what we did when the engineering team designed and developed dedicated graphics cards for Indigo Elan, Onyx or other models.

Results of such approach are impressive and Pliops XDP confirms numbers given by others, here numbers are even more spectacular with 6x more capacity with data management services around in-line compression, 5x costs savings and 10x in term of application-level performance such databases, analytics, AI/M... with latency reduction and bottlenecks elimination.

The card delivers up to 3.2 million random read IOPs and 1.2 million random write IOPs for a total capacity of 128TB of protected data 64TB increment. The XDP leverages Intel® 3D NAND QLC SSDs, Intel being also one of the investor in the company via its Intel Capital arm. The product can be deployed in multiple ways to address different needs, multiple cards within a server, cluster multiple systems vis their XDP card...

I identify more than 20 players working at different level in this recent super hot category with lots of promises. Among them new companies well funded and also of course gorillas. Coldago has published several months ago a report about DPU, you can check this page.