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Toshiba is utilizing the 2018 Open Compute Project (OCP) U.S. Summit to announce general availability of their new KumoScale™ storage software for cloud applications. This new NVMe-oF™ (NVM Express™ over Fabrics) shared accelerated storage software enables the use of NVMe-oF to make flash storage accessible over a data center network, providing a simplified, flexible abstraction of physical disks into a pool of block storage, yet still preserving the high performance associated with direct-attached NVMe SSDs.
The technology leading to KumoScale was first announced by Toshiba last year, and it was subsequently certified as the only NVMe-oF-compliant storage target software by the University of New Hampshire InterOperability Laboratory, which is the leading testing and certification lab for NVMe technology and software. All system functionality is managed by the KumoScale software, which allows for the creation of networked storage nodes that can be immediately deployed at scale. Allowing the powerful NVMe SSDs to be shared provides improved utilization. KumoScale also allows for more efficient use of compute nodes via dynamic orchestration. This enables high-performance storage for container orchestration frameworks such as Kubernetes, and this can be expanded to in-house developed provisioning systems.
According to Steve Fingerhut, senior vice president and general manager of Toshiba’s SSD and Cloud Software business units, “The cloud was built on DAS SSDs due to their low cost and ease of deployment. However, customers are finding the fixed nature of DAS inhibits the flexibility promised by the adoption of containers and orchestration frameworks. With the availability of KumoScale software, these cloud data centers can scale and provision server and flash storage independently to accommodate unexpected and peak workloads. This increases data center efficiency and gives the agility needed to respond to new revenue opportunities.”
Toshiba has collaborated with Portworx, the industry’s leading cloud native storage management solution for Kubernetes® on KumoScale to provide a solution to make containerized big data, fast data, or machine learning workloads higher performing and easier to manage. Portworx provides Kubernetes storage that provisions dynamically, has high availability, is automatically backed-up and allows for multi-cloud workflows. Running a Portworx volume on top of KumoScale’s target namespaces allows the raw performance of NVMe to be flexibly and efficiently configured with the leading orchestration framework – this is an industry first.
Toshiba continues its commitment to helping cloud data center customers maximize their flash and compute resources. Toshiba and Portworx will be jointly demonstrating KumoScale at OCP at the San Jose Convention Center in San Jose, CA on March 20th and 21st. You can visit them at booth #A21.