Fungible is shaking the data center storage landscape

Fungible, founded in 2015 by Pradeep Sindhu and Bertrand Serlet with more than $310M raised, has a mission, the mission to change the data center and in particular how the storage is deployed and managed at scale. Considering that these environments hit a wall, the company changed radically the data center approach with a new processor centric model based on the Data Processing Unit (aka DPU) model it invented. Having this third element in the infrastructure beyond classic CPU, for some time GPU, brings a new level of performance, reliability and scalability to large data centers. We had the opportunity to meet Fungible during a recent IT Press Tour where the team shared his view, product details and strategy.

The vision of the company is summarized by the 2 keywords disaggregation and composability. First, the disaggregation term means the capability to manage devices and elements at a very fine grain level and decouple storage, memory, processors and other components from servers. An other way to present that is to think about an exploded model where you can see each elements. Having that list, map, directory and topology of all the entities, it requires next a logic to associate, group, unify or pool together all these elements. You can build a virtual storage pool if the logic is limited to storage or virtual machines if the composability embraces cpu, memory, network cards and storage. And for such approach, NVMe-oF is a fundamental method to achieve this.

For Fungible, this new model for the data center is driven by DPU and its capability to mask complexity and boost manageability, performance and reliability fueled by TCP associated with NVMe.

The first product released by Fungible was the storage cluster named the FS1600 announced a few months ago. It is a 2U chassis split in 2 internal zone each with its DPU - a Fungible F1 -, Ethernet ports, memory, SSD and power supply. It embeds 24 hot pluggable NVMe SSD for a total capacity of 70TB and delivers 13M IOPS, 120𝝻s of latency and 75GB/s. In term of data management functions embedded by the DPU, we find thin provisioning, erasure coding, replication, snapshots and clones, encryption, compression and QoS. All these FS1600 deployed are controlled and managed by the Fungible Composer acting as the control plane.

This storage array leverages the enterprise network widely deployed i.e TCP/IP over Ethernet. The gain is immediate with a reliable fast network already in place and without considering a dedicated network and technology such InfiniBand or Fibre Channel. Using TCP to exchange NVMe messages makes topology easier presenting network drives as local ones thanks to NVMe.

Beyond the array, Fungible accelerates his strategy and just announced a new component in the infrastructure with a storage initiator card equipped with a Fungible S1 DPU. This PCIe Gen 4 card is available at 50, 100 or 200GE delivering 2.3M IOPS per client. It offloads demanding from the CPU such compression and encryption done in-line with such card.

In this domain, Fungible clearly wishes to drive the market initiative promoting a real data center model for the future starting today.