KumoScale™ Software

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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.

What is KumoScale™?

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

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

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

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

All compute nodes on the network can access to KumoScale™ storage. Access control is also available.

Use cases

Typical applications include:

Cloud services
Consumer SaaS services
Marketplaces, clearinghouses (travel, tickets, stock trades)
Massively multi-player gaming

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™ 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

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

Product Brief (236KB)

Past press releases

*: 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.

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