
What is KumoScale™?
What is KumoScale™?
KumoScale™ storage software suite implements a fast, networked block storage service based on the NVMe™ over Fabrics (NVMe-oF™) standard. Focused on speed and scale, KumoScale™ software delivers the flexibility of a shared, clustered storage pool at the similar performance of DAS* (Direct Attached Storage) NVMe™ SSD.
Sharable NVMe™ SSD pool and delivers high utilization and flexeibility.
Sharable NVMe™ SSD pool and delivers high utilization and flexeibility.
- Share Fast Flash-based NVMe™ SSDs
Capacity and performance of today’s solid state disks have exploded and are far more than a single compute node can consume. Sharing SSDs over the network is an urgent need. Until now, networked storage has been either slow or expensive, or both. When it comes to NVMe-oF™ , it is no longer true. KumoScale™ increases storage utilization by sharing SSD and adds more flexibility to provision the right amount of capacity from the pool through the software at the performance of NVMe™ SSD.
Born in the cloud
Born in the cloud
- Integrated with Kubernetes®, Ansible™, Graphite™ and other cloud-native infrastructure software
- Works with any standards-compliant NVMe-oF™ initiator and any NVMe™ SSD. No proprietary software nor hardware are required.
Supports high performance network
Supports high performance network
NVMe-oF™ standard offers several network transport layer options.
- RoCEv2 (RDMA for Converged Ethernet) for those customers who need high network performance
- TCP/IP for broad network compatibility
The KumoScale™ runs on Ethernet, supporting RoCEv2, TCP/IP or a combination of both.
Future Extensibility
Future Extensibility
KumoScale™ provides REST API to integrate data center management tools, such as orchestration tools, provisioning tools, telemetry tools, and more.
- How Storage is Provisioned and Managed
In a Kubernetes® environment, customer applications are connected to KumoScale™ storage by the Container Storage Interface (CSI). For bare-metal environments, Ansible™ playbooks or other popular automation tools may be used for deployment automation and provisioning of storage to compute nodes. For short-term testing and Proof-of-Concept activities, CLI and GUI interfaces are also available.
- Monitoring and Alerting
KumoScale™ software provides telemetry (time series metrics) and logging (asynchronous events) to an existing telemetry and logging infrastructure. Using these interfaces, adaptation to new monitoring frameworks is done easily and quickly.
Access and security to shared block storage
Access and security to shared block storage
All compute nodes on the network can access to KumoScale™ storage. Access control is also available.
Use cases
Use cases
Typical applications include:
- Cloud services
- Consumer SaaS services
- Marketplaces, clearinghouses (travel, tickets, stock trades)
- Massively multi-player gaming

KumoScale™ architecture
KumoScale™ architecture
The KumoScale™ suite consists of multiple components.

Description |
|
---|---|
KumoScale™ Storage Node | KumoScale™ Storage Node accepts NVMe-oF™ I/O commands directed at virtual volumes and translates them into NVMe™ commands directed at the physical SSDs installed in the storage node. |
KumoScale™ Provisioner | KumoScale™ Provisioner is a distributed, resilient service that tracks the fleet of SSDs and KumoScale™ storage nodes. It handles the mapping of user volumes to nodes and to physical drives. |
KumoScale™ CSI driver | KumoScale™ CSI driver is an implementation of the Container Storage Interface– a standards-based method for connecting storage to orchestrated containers. It provides an API translation between an orchestration system and KumoScale™ Provisioner for containerized deployments. |
KumoScale™ Analytics Service | KumoScale™ Analytics Service collects and analyzes telemetry information from the storage nodes for the purpose of optimized data placement. |
KumoScale™ Platform Requirements
KumoScale™ Platform Requirements
KumoScale™ is a software only storage fabric solution that have been tested on both bare metal and Kubernetes® deployments on a wide range of industry standard servers. Any NVMe-oF™ compliant initiator can be used, including Linux® kernel version 4.8 or later. Supported platform is show below.
KumoScale™ Appliance Platform Requirements
KumoScale™ Appliance Platform Requirements
Components | Minimal Requirement |
---|---|
Memory | 64GB DDR4 |
System Disk | 2 x 128GB SATA DOM |
NIC | MCX516A-CCAT, MCX545A-CCAN ConnectX-5 EN network interface card, 100GbE dual/single port QSFP28, PCIe®3.0 x16 ROHS R6 MCX416A-CCAT ConnectX-4 EN network interface card, 100GbE dual/single port QSFP28, PCIe®3.0 x16 ROHS R6 Solarflare Communications XtremeScale SFC9250 10/25/40/50/100G Ethernet Controller OR Solarflare XtremeScale X2541-100G Adapter |
Power Supply | Dual power supply, hot swappable |
Management Interface | A dedicated management port is optional. KumoScale™ can use the data port for management traffic, or it can utilize a dedicated management port. |
KumoScale™ Provisioner | KumoScale™ Provisioner requires an additional server or a container. |
Documents
Documents
- Product Brief (236KB)
*: 15us latency addition at 4KB read compared to DAS. Measured by KIOXIA in June 2020 using measurement tool specified by KIOXIA. 15us is the difference of 4KB read latency between DAS and NVMe-oF™ storage configuration on the same hardware.
- NVMe and NVMe-oF are trademarks of NVM Express, Inc.
- PCIe is a registered trademark of PCI-SIG.
- Kubernetes is a registered trademark of The Linux Foundation in the United States and/or other countries.
- Ansible is a registered trademark of Red Hat, Inc. in the United States and other countries.
- Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds in the U.S. and other countries.
- All company names, product names and service names may be trademarks of their respective companies.
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