A3cube Fortissimo Foundation for High-Performance Hyper-Convergence

A3CUBE Inc., a developer of communication technology that extends the capability of standard PCIe interconnect to produce networked computing and storage solutions, introduced its Fortissimo Foundation building block software solution.

Coupled with A3CUBE’s previously announced RONNIE Express platform, Fortissimo Foundation provides improvements in application performance and data center efficiency, particularly in unstructured, big data environments.

It works in concert with RONNIEE Express data path accelerator and RONNIEE NICs to introduce a low-latency solution that enhances PCIe with a direct in memory communication that transparently bridges local and remote resources. Local-CPU to remote device access times of less than 0.8usec are achieved, improving access times compared to traditional storage configurations and enabling storage performance to scale linearly across multiple nodes.

“A3CUBE’s Fortissimo Foundation enables large scale-out applications such as NoSQL databases, Hadoop, Object Storage, and scale-out NAS to deliver faster performance than they’re typical capable of delivering with current off-the-shelf server and networking components,” said Marc Staimer, president and CDS, Dragon Slayer Consulting.  “Fortissimo Foundation doesn’t make scale-out server applications, it just makes them much faster while reducing their infrastructure and associated costs.”

Fortissimo Foundation is a clustered, pervasive, global direct-remote I/O access system that linearly scales I/O bandwidth, memory, flash and HDD storage capacity and server performance to provide an in-memory scale-out solution. It intelligently aggregates all resources of a data center cluster into a global name space, bridging all remote compute and storage resources to look and act as if they were local. By providing a set of hardware and software building blocks through Fortissimo and RONNIEE Express, A3CUBE enables organizations to deploy the power of high-end HPC clusters using low-cost, commodity servers and storage without the high complexity, cost and fundamental limitations of traditional scale out systems.

Traditional scale out storage requires complex management of multiple RAID volumes and file systems while providing limited scalability of throughput or performance. Fortissimo Foundation is a simple, powerful new approach that overcomes these limitations with global optimization of all compute resources, scalable throughput and IO/s, memory and storage aggregation, direct parallel data access, and converged computation. This architecture provides enterprises existing storage environment with high-IO/s performance, DRAM that scales to petabytes and no kernel OS involvement in the communications stack in an integrated hardware-accelerated, software-defined-storage architecture.

Using any combination of memory, flash, SSD, HDD, CPU or data center I/O fabric, A3CUBE provides investment protection and cost savings from transparently integrating into the existing data center infrastructure and using commodity servers with in-line data deduplication, compression and multi-level data replication that runs in memory, and delivers maximum reliability without the overhead or added latency of traditional systems.

Fortissimo foundation adapts to any workload, including NoSQL-based, Hadoop-based and I/O-intense applications without changes to the application, OS or file system. For example in NoSQL-based systems, Fortissimo Foundation can be configured to provide a greater than 10X increase in TPS (Transaction Per Second) performance. Conversely, the NoSQL-based system can be configured to optimize operating cost with Fortissimo Foundation providing an equivalent level of TPS performance while providing 16:1 consolidation of server cluster size, reducing 80 servers down to 5.

“Rather than having to buy  high-end proprietary systems to support today’s varying workloads, low-cost commodity servers can be deployed and Fortissimo Foundation can transform them into a sophisticated storage and computing cluster,” said Antonella Rubicco, CEO, A3CUBE. “Fortissimo is well-suited to meet the requirements of applications that need to support fast data access in parallel and that require scalable bandwidth with no bottlenecks.”