SimplyBlock to shake the SDS landscape

SimplyBlock, founded in 2022 in Berlin by Michael Schmidt and Rob Pankow, was one of the good surprises during the recent IT Press Tour organized end of June in Berlin.

The young company develops a block SDS in the first release and should add file and object interfaces later.

They target expensive configurations usually covered by hardware solutions and wish to appear as a universal solution for various workloads and use cases operating on-premises and in the cloud.

The first release exposes a block interface and is based on SPDK with interesting advanced features such as high durability, encryption, clones and unlimited snapshots, compaction/compression, tiering or replication. The architecture resides on a multi-node approach with up to 255 nodes in the cluster leveraging standards like x86, Linux and Ethernet networking.

Surfing on the NVMe and NVMe-oF waves, the product delivers up to 500,000 IOPS per CPU-core and ultra low latency around 10+ usecs. Data protection is achieved with a distributed erasure coding implementation and data integrity is guaranteed by a transaction approach with a variable write size atomicity. All writes are atomic across nodes and devices.

The company targets Ceph installations even if Ceph provides a unified model exposing block, file and object. Today SimplyBlock offers only block and the product is in beta.

The pricing model is based on effective capacity used per month and the product can be fully tested for 3 months, perfect for MSPs and early adopters.

The roadmap is ambitious with AWS, Kubernetes support soon followed by GCP and Azure and later in Q3/24 file and objects services to offer a unified SDS.