FMS: NGD Systems Embedded Azure IoT Edge Service With Computational Storage SSD, and 32TB Newport U.2 SSD

At FMS, NGD Systems, Inc.  embedded the Azure IoT Edge service directly within its Computational Storage SSDs, making them a platform to support the service directly within a storage device.

In addition, the company introduced its 32TB Newport U.2 SSD, which offers <12W of power, doubling the capacity of the existing Newport Platform U.2 SSD form-factor.

The two announcements underscore the firm in developing the edge ecosystem, achieving improvements in power, cost and physical footprint for data-intensive big-data-set workloads. These real-world use cases prove that scalable, integrated Computational Storage devices provide empirical benefits to edge applications.

“Organizations are increasingly leveraging edge deployments to support mission-critical workloads such as real-time analytics, ML and other IoT-needed solutions. But recent data shows that only about one of ten enterprises are truly satisfied with their compute and storage performance at the edge,” said Nader Salessi, CEO, NGD. “NGD Systems’ technology brings compute directly to the data, so processing results at the edge, right where data is created, is possible, improving latency of the system. Further assisting with this trend, we’ve embedded Azure IoT Edge within our Computational Storage and introduced new 32TB SSDs that provide new avenues for our customers. NGD has continually improved its support for many types of deployments, including edge-centric solutions, thus removing bottlenecks in network and storage capacity all over the storage infrastructure.“

The Azure IoT Edge service enables organizations to run cloud workloads on edge infrastructure. By moving parts of a cloud workload to the edge, an enterprise’s IoT devices and other distributed endpoints can spend less time sending data to the cloud and react more quickly to events. The company’s enablement of this service within our Computational Storage Drives (CSD) makes it for enterprises to run Azure workloads at the edge and enables a workflow to Azure Cloud.

The company’s in-situ processing technology enables organizations to analyze data right where it’s created. This is an improvement for edge computing, which involves massive volumes of data streaming from many endpoints. The firm enables the edge infrastructure to reduce confusion about where the value of data lies – in edge or in the cloud – as it is processed or analyzed where the results are needed most. With this announcement, users can leverage the company’s platform to support Azure workloads at the edge with almost no changes to current code requirements.

This announcement also highlights the firm’s cutting-edge engineering efforts, as it is the first to embed Azure IoT Edge within an SSD. No other solution is capable of embedding an OS directly within a storage device. Because all these capabilities are ASIC-based, customers experience reductions in power and physical footprint and improved scalability. The innovation (with well over 30 patents) marks the continuation of an ecosystem for integrated and scalable Computational Storage Devices (CSx). Most other approaches to solving this problem rely on costly FPGA’s, which are neither integrated nor scalable for mass production, especially in power and space constrained environments like the edge.

The company’s Computational Storage Drive (CSD) solution, with 32TBs in a U.2 SSD, doubles the capacity of its previously released U.2 products without impacting power or performance. These drives are for customers that need more storage capacity in an environment with power and space limitations. By offering a device of this size, with <12W of power requirement and the added Computational Storage Services (CSS), the firm has also set the bar for core NVMe SSDs.

Both Azure IoT Edge embedded CSDs and the 32TB U.2 SSD are available for deployment.