Chinese Public Cloud Provider UCloud Selecting ScaleFlux

ScaleFlux, Inc., in deploying computational storage at scale, announced that Shanghai UCloud Cloud Computing Co., Ltd. (UCloud), China’s independent public cloud provider, has selected ScaleFlux to power its UPHost (UCloud Physical Host) infrastructure for big data, database, data warehousing, and a growing list of data-driven applications.

ScaleFlux provides production-qualified Computational Storage Subsystem (CSS) solutions that integrate algorithmically complex compute engines with terabytes of 3D NAND flash storage. CSS integrates into standard server and storage infrastructure through a Linux plug-in software package combined with standard PCIe HHHL add-In card and 2.5″ U.2 drive level form factors.

“UPHost offers outstanding computing performance to meet the core application scenarios for high performance and stability, and is built to run applications at any scale for our customers,” said Xianfeng Mo, CTO and founder, UCloud. “With the integration of ScaleFlux CSS into UPHost, we are further extending UCloud’s value proposition by dramatically reducing the time to complete big data and Database jobs, while also optimizing flash storage capacity utilization.“

Large pools of Computational Storage will eliminate
scaling roadblocks faced by data-driven infrastructure where: 

• Traditional CPUs are inefficient when tasked to process modern, intense workloads
• The latency and power to move massive data sets from storage to the CPU is too expensive
• Compute-intensive workloads can be sped up by orders-of-magnitude when parallelized across flash storage subsystems

These scaling challenges are commonly faced with applications in the field of big data, database, data warehousing, content delivery, search, machine learning, AI, VR, genomics, security, HPC and others.

“By taking an evolutionary and simple approach to integrating CSS into application frameworks, we are delighted to provide our revolutionary Computational Storage solutions for UCloud’s UPHost infrastructure that will open new revenue generating use-cases for data-driven applications at scale with fast time-to-market,” said Hao Zhong, CEO and co-founder, ScaleFlux. “One of the primary values of CSS is the ability to reprogram new hardware acceleration engines in-system, which can evolve the infrastructure in lock step with new customer demands.“

ScaleFlux CSS features field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and enables acceleration for compression, erasure coding, and KV store, in addition to encryption, authentication, and common compute intensive algorithms. Future application level acceleration algorithms such as database queries, machine learning, AI, media transcoding, search, and more, can be dropped into the same hardware infrastructure. By taking a programmable hardware approach, ScaleFlux has set CSS apart from commodity SSDs through the addition of application level, value-added features while facilitating mass deployment of 3D NAND flash media.

ScaleFlux CSS is available.

Read also:
Start-Up ScaleFlux in Computational Storage Subsystem
Innovative approach with embedded compute on storage board
by Philippe Nicolas | 2017.06.19 | News