Clever Cloud Selects Kalray

Clever Cloud SAS, European provider of automation and optimization solutions for websites and applications hosting, and Kalray SA announce a partnership aimed at strengthening the relationship between the 2 companies for the deployment of next-gen storage solutions.

Clever Cloud, which is currently setting up in a third Parisian data center and strengthening its technical platform, has chosen to partner with Kalray and its Flashbox, a new gen of NVMe storage array that can accommodate up to 24 PCIe (NVMe) SSDs, for its storage solution.

Performance, Resilience and Opennes
Without a host CPU, the Flashbox leverages K200-LP accelerator cards featuring the Coolidge DPU (Data Processing Unit) that takes advantage of the patented MPPA (Massively Parallel Processor Array) architecture developed by Kalray. This chip takes advantage of the power of 80 parallel cores and enables data centers adopting NVMe SSD storage to remove bottlenecks and improve performance, while consuming minimal power and resources.

Flashbox benefits from fast interfaces and low power consumption. It can deliver up to 12 million IO/s through a 2x100Gb/s network interface and is based on market standards such as Storage Performance Development Kit (SPDK), NVMe/TCP or RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCEv1/v2). It will eventually be offered by storage vendors using Kalray cards.

“Kalray’s solution meets all our needs and the criteria that are important to us, whether in terms of sovereignty, openness, resilience, energy efficiency or performance,” said Quentin Adam, CEO, Clever Cloud.

The Flashbox is currently being tested in Clever Cloud’s infrastructure and will join its Paris, France, data center where it will work alongside the latest gen of compute servers it Cloud is installing there. It will enable the firm to offer greater flexibility to its customers in managing storage, but also to support the launch of new offerings.

This is part of the development of Clever Cloud’s storage API, which allows various storage sources, whether local, remote or via third-party cloud service providers, to be simply allocated to the VMs that host users’ applications. This open, multi-cloud approach is what makes Clever Cloud successful.

Clever Cloud and Kalray: For “Made In France” R&D
The two firms are also partnering in several projects where they are working together to leverage Kalray’s K200-LP cards as accelerators to offload Clever Cloud’s network layer functionalities or computations related to the protection and redundancy of data stored within Clever Cloud’s servers.

“The collaboration with Kalray is not just about 2 French companies that have an interest in working together, but about 2 projects that have, at their heart, the creation of value through innovation, where the partnership is also between the technical teams,” adds Steven Le Roux, CTO, Clever Cloud.

“We are very pleased to be working with Clever Cloud, with whom we share common values, both in terms of innovation and the philosophy of our solutions, which are designed to be easy to use, flexible, scalable and open. Kalray has a unique position in Europe in this market of very high-performance and low-power processors. We are proud to be able to build innovative French storage solutions with Clever Cloud and thus contribute to the technological sovereignty of France and Europe,” declares Eric Baissus, president and CEO, Kalray.

The Flashbox will be showcased at the upcoming Flash Memory Summit, from August 2 to 4, 2022, in Santa Clara Convention Center, CA.