IT Press Tour 67: NGX Storage

We had the opportunity to meet NGX Storage for the second time during the recent 67th edition of The IT Press Tour held last week in Sofia, Bulgaria. The first meeting was in December 2022 in Lisbon, Portugal, during the similar event when we unveiled NGX to the world.NGX Storage is a European enterprise storage vendor founded in 2015 and headquartered in Ankara, Türkiye, within the Hacettepe Teknokent technology park, a university-linked innovation campus. The company brands itself as “Made in Europe” and operates advanced R&D centers in India, with commercial operations spanning four continents. It is presented by CEO Beyhan Çalışkan, CEO, who shared his perspective and rationale behind the NGX story. The company’s founding premise is straightforward: data storage should be powerful, flexible, and manageable across every protocol from a single platform. Its mission is to simplify how organizations store, scale, and protect data in an era of exponential data growth.

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NGX Storage frames its value proposition around a clear industry pain point: enterprise storage has become fragmented, expensive, and operationally overwhelming. Organizations today juggle separate NAS, SAN, and object storage platforms, each with its own tools, teams, and infrastructure costs. The result is that companies spend more time managing storage than actually using their data to innovate. On top of this structural complexity, the AI era introduces a new set of technical demands, training and inference workloads require fast access to enormous datasets, AI clusters need thousands of concurrent data streams, and modern infrastructure expectations have shifted to microsecond NVMe latency and extreme throughput. Unstructured data from images, video, sensors, and AI pipelines is expanding faster than traditional systems can scale. NGX’s argument is that these converging pressures require a fundamentally new storage architecture — one that is high-performance and built for extreme data scale from the ground up.

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NGX Storage offers a unified portfolio covering the full spectrum of enterprise storage needs, organized into five product lines

• The NGX-H, is a dual-controller hybrid storage system scaling up to 38 PB of raw capacity. It supports Fibre Channel, iSCSI, NFS, SMB, and S3 protocols, with up to 64 Gb/s Fibre Channel interfaces and 100Gb/s Ethernet, using SAS/NL-SAS HDDs and SAS/NVMe SSDs for flexible tiering between performance and capacity
• The NGX-AFA mirrors the NGX-H architecture but is built exclusively on SAS/NVMe SSDs, delivering up to 34PB of raw capacity with the same protocol support and high-speed connectivity options, targeting latency-sensitive workloads.
  The NGX ExaScale is the company’s scale-out NVMe block storage platform, designed as software-defined storage for AI, HPC, and data-intensive workloads. It uses NVMe-oF with RDMA/TCP transport, with capacity scaling that simultaneously increases IOPS, throughput, and client connections. It currently scales to tens of petabytes, with hundreds of PB planned in future releases
• The NGX HyperIO is the scale-out object storage platform, built on high-density appliance nodes supporting 24 to 60 drive configurations, up to 200 GbE connectivity, and an SSD/NVMe hot tier for metadata acceleration. It features erasure coding, geo-dispersed data protection, distributed metadata services, automatic load balancing, self-healing, and multi-site replication, making it suitable for analytics, backup, streaming media, and large-scale archival workloads
• The Scale-Out NAS capability is built on top of the NGX-AFA and Hybrid platforms using pNFS, SMB3, and S3 protocols, with NVMe SCM for metadata, no erasure coding or RAID overhead over the network, and support for interfaces from 10Gb/s to 200Gb/s. It is designed for AI workloads, HPC, and data lake architectures at exabyte scale

Across all products, the platform includes general enterprise features such as a user-friendly GUI, inline compression and deduplication, thin provisioning, zero detection, full RAID levels (1, 5, 6, 10, 50, 60, Triple Parity), and three-way and four-way mirroring.

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NGX Storage offers a MetroScale Cluster capability for active-active datacenter deployments, delivering zero RTO and zero RPO through MetroCluster Stretch and MetroCluster IP configurations. The solution is validated for enterprise workloads including SAP, Oracle, Red Hat, and Microsoft Windows environments.

99% of NGX Storage customers are enterprise organizations. Verticals served include Communications & Technology, Finance & Banking, Education & Research, Healthcare, Manufacturing, Media & Entertainment, Oil & Gas, Defence & Military, Video Surveillance, and large private enterprises. Use cases span virtualization, databases, VDI, CCTV, HPC, AI/ML and Big Data, backup and archive, media production, business continuity and disaster recovery, cloud provider infrastructure (OpenStack, CloudStack, XEN), and log analysis platforms such as Splunk.

NGX Storage’s technology ecosystem includes partnerships with Intel, Nvidia, Veeam, VMware, Kioxia, ATTO, Toshiba, Western Digital, and OpenStack. The company has already deployed a production-ready scale-out NVMe system available as software-defined storage, and is actively expanding its global footprint into Poland, Spain, Malaysia, South Korea, and the UAE. It is partnering with global OEM vendors and is currently developing the third generation of its unified storage platform, reinforcing its positioning as a full-lifecycle storage vendor from high-performance AI infrastructure down to long-term archive, all within a single ecosystem with no hardware vendor lock-in.

The full presentation is available here.