Synapse Design Launches Cloud Hardware Platform Running OpenStack Icehouse

Synapse Design, a SOC and ASIC design services partner serving tier-one system and semiconductor companies, announced its cloud hardware platform based on a Freescale T4240 network processor and natively running OpenStack Icehouse.

The cloud hardware platform is a configurable design targeted at medium to high performance cloud appliance storage and compute markets.

“As the amount of data being pumped into the cloud continues to grow exponentially, we saw an opportunity to leverage our world-class expertise in the storage domain and have developed a cloud platform that could lower the cost per terabyte over a three-, five- and seven-year period,” said Satish Bagalkotkar, president, CEO and co-founder, Synapse Design.

Mike McKean, senior director for Synapse Design’s embedded systems efforts, added: “Synapse Design’s implementation provides 50% lower power for the same compute performance while enabling increased networking throughput with advanced hardware techniques. Deploying this solution at scale will save power when compared to competing architectures with equivalent compute performance. One of our key enablers is a fully embedded Linux distribution that Synapse Design has integrated specifically for this environment.”

The platform is configurable, with the initial reference platform having 24 processing threads, four 10GbE channels, eight 1GbE channels and supporting 96TB of SSD storage with currently available drive technology. Compute and storage instantiations with a variety of configurations can be enabled and a variety of host and drive side interfaces are available.

The company has anheritage in storage device and systems design and is positioned to help datacenter customers achieve performance and value through knowledge of flash and rotating media subsystems. Reducing power in the data center while maintaining or even increasing compute capability helps to decrease overall TCO. Building on open source tools further reduces these development costs.