Hyper-Converged Storage

FORTISSIMO FOUNDATION

Balancing Application Efficiency and

Performance

Unleashing the Modern Data

CenterOvercoming storage limitations

Exponential data growth is posing great challenges and is opening newopportunities to many industries forcing us to deeply reevaluate how wework with data in computer systems. Data is not a simple result of ourdigital society but has to be considered a precious resource. In effect,every human activity produces data and to exploit its huge potential weneed to be able to analyze data and respond to it in real time. The keypoint becomes then the efficiency of data access. Understanding thisenables the enterprise to take advantage of this technologic trend and theenormous economic benefits of performance data.Unfortunately, traditional storage architectures and emerging softwareonly solutions are unable to provide the right architecture to efficientlymanage present and future data analytic opportunities mainly becausethey lack in the necessary flexibility. Experience with data intensiveenvironments shows that whenever huge data volumes are requiredconventional storage architectures quickly reach their limitations.

The main limitations of current storage solutions include:■ Time-consuming management (including data and system recovery)■ Exploding costs for high-availability, now required at multiple levels(Disk, Node, System)■ Major problems with (planned) downtime■ Over or under-provisioning■ High costs per IOPS and capacity■ Application performance issues■ Scale-out & scalability issues

Setting the foundation for sustainable future business, FORTISSIMOFOUDATION introduces unique technologies and features tostandard hardware, realizing an extremely high value propositionthat has no equivalent in the market today.

FORTISSIMO FOUNDATION (FF) integrates in a single product all thefeatures required to satisfy present and future data requirementsincluding unique features like, but not limited to:

Direct Application Acceleration Unique “Scale-out In Memory Storage” Unique “Local In Memory Boost” Scalable Parallel Data Access (I/O and IOPS)

In this way FF is able to solve all the problems related to traditionalstorage architectures and data analysis.

These are all extremely good reasons to consideralternative storage strategies to be able to

provide a solid foundation for your present andfuture business.

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A new simple and powerful architecture

A3CUBE’s Fortissimo Foundation architecture enables you to easily manage data andperformance in a simple but powerful way.This hyper-converged, unique “Hardware accelerated Software-Defined System” HSDS™ isdesigned for all environments enabling high performance data access requirements andapplication acceleration needs.

FORTISSIMO FOUNDATION offers extremely high scalability at high levels of performancefor any workload with an industry first “in memory scale out capability” thanks to the ultralow latency memory to memory communication architecture called “Data Path

Accelerator” (DPA ™).

FORTISSIMO FOUNDATION intelligently combines an advanced ZFS file system acrossmultiple nodes overcoming the limitation of a single system. It aggregates the DRAMacross all the system nodes creating a powerful DRAM based system and provides paralleldata access without using complex and difficult tools to manage today’s parallel filesystems.

UNMATCHED FLEXIBLE SCALABILITY OF CAPACITY AND PERFORMANCE

■ FF supports multiple configurations including unique global scale-out in memory

storage (IMS) and local in memory boost■ No forced migration due to scalability limits■ Extremely long lifecycle thanks to technology refreshes■ Investment protection using a fully open hardware approach (no proprietary driver

required to support any kind of storage devices)

3Hyper-Convergence

FAULT TOLERANCE AND SELF-HEALING @ MULTIPLE SYSTEM LEVEL■ No extra costs for high availability (Node Level and System Level Protection) ■ Provides high service levels ■ Zero downtime ■ Unique hardware fault back support

BASED ON OUR DISTRIBUTED ZFS FILE SYTEM ARCHITECTURE■ No exotic file system■ Extending the benefit of ZFS across multiple nodes■ Transforms ZFS into a high performance parallel file system

HARDWARE ACCELERATED MUTLINODE STORAGE COMMUNICATION & AGGREGATION

■ Delivers massive storage consolidation potential within one architecture

SYSTEM PLATFORM WITH END-TO-END MAINTENANCE■ Use of a standard file system with well proven benefits■ Fewer evaluation, implementation and maintenance tasks

HIGH PERFORMANCE THROUGH HIGH PARALLELISM OF READ AND WRITE OPERATIONS AND DIRECT MEMORY TO MEMORY COMMUNICATION

■ High I/O performance is achieved at a much lower cost

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Hyper-Convergence

FORTISSIMO FOUDATION is a revolutionary converged infrastructure solution that

consolidates the compute (server) tier and the storage tier into a single, integrated

appliance, providing acceleration using A3CUBE scale out “in memory” capability

across all the servers connected with FF.

The A3CUBE solution is radically simple, extremely scalable, extremely powerful and

uniquely flexible compared to any existing solution on the market today.

A3CUBE has redefined storage scalability, reliability,manageability and performance to help the enterpriseeasily manage dynamic business changes.A3CUBE combines powerful technologies together alongwith sophisticated engineering to realize an unique marketwide product, starting from how modern applicationsworks and creating the perfect environment to extol theirfull potential

Turnkey, end-to-end solution, FORTISSIMO FOUDATION, is based on storage nodes with enterprise-class x86 servers equipped with A3CUBE Hardware DPA accelerator (RONNIEE express).The system supports many different configurationsfrom 5 multimode fully direct connected for real-time response in any condition up to 512 storage nodes in a 19- inch standard multiple racks to reach a capacity of up to 10s of petabytes and application specific hybrid configuration with very large scalability.Data storage is distributed across the storage nodes in the system aggregating SSDs, DRAM and HDD while providing parallel data I/O access.Another important feature of the system is the revolutionary easy to use management that permits the user to configure any storage dimension in minutes including very complex “in memory configurations” and application oriented tuning with no experience in storage and cluster configuration.FORTISSIMO FOUNDATION is equipped with an easy to use GUI that allows even relatively inexperienced administrators to centrally perform all management tasks, along with monitoring and reporting and tune the performance when required.All components are optimized in terms of performance and reliability.

5Turnkey, end-to-end solution

Distributed scale-out platform

FORTISSIMO FOUDATION architecture is completely different from conventional storagesystem architectures.The scalability of capacity and performance is achieved through the storage nodes, whichare configured with cost-efficient, performance-optimized industry-standard servers andstorage subsystems and are equipped with a revolutionary data path accelerator thatoffload the OS from all the communication tasks.The system offers a large number of these storage nodes and manages them as a singlestorage pool. In addition, data is evenly distributed across all the storage nodes, where it isstored and written redundantly.DRAM can be aggregated across all the nodes and used as DRAM-based SSD 1000x fasterthan any existing disk. Direct memory access across different nodes permits thearchitecture to extol the true performance of memory caching algorithms providing veryhigh level file system performance.

This scale-out approach has many advantages:

■ Linear scalability: the performance of the system is scaled linearly by adding new nodes■ High performance: the distributed storage of data across several hard disks and storage

nodes enables very high-performance of the system■ The “In memory” scale-out capability enables unmatched ultra fast data access to any

application■ Fault tolerance: the entire system is resilient due to the storage of data replicas, thus

ensuring protection against hard disk and storage node faults or outages

I/O

I/O

I/O

I/O

I/O

“In memory” Scale-out architecture 6

HSDS ™ Hardware Accelerated Software-Defined Storage

FORTISSIMO FOUDATION features a ZFS open source storage file system, one of the leadingsoftware technologies for modern storage. FF permits ZFS to be used in parallel across multiplenodes overcoming the limitation of the single node capability of standard ZFS implementation andscaling the well known benefits and performance of ZFS

FORTISSIMO FOUDATION uses software-defined, hardware accelerated mechanisms to aggregate allthe resources of the storage nodes and provide parallel concurrent access to data in an unique way,transforming a standard ZFS file system into a high performance parallel file system (“In memory”)

Single File System (ZFS)

Applications

Storage Nodes

“In memory” scale-out architecture 7

Intelligently optimized building blocks

The Fortissimo Foundation hardware architecture is the basis for high availability and the massive scalability of capacity and performance.For that reason, the entire hardware infrastructure features extremely powerful building blocks across the board. For each storage node,including all data copies, the system delivers data throughput at a rate of 1.5 or 2.9 GB/s. The storage nodes are integrated in a redundantinternal network. The nodes are interconnected through an ultra fast and evolutionary “in Memory Network” based on a novel PCIenetwork on the back-end that guaranties unmatched ultra-low latency and scalable bandwidth. On the front-end a 10 Gb Ethernet networkensures constant performance

The architecture is Extremely Simple, Extremely Scalable, Extremely Flexible and Extremely Powerful. Thanks to optimized building blocks FORTISSIMO FOUDATION is able to deliver unique capabilities that offer perfect tuning of your applications and the use of the latest SSDs technologies.Multiple configurations are supported to reach a capacity of many petabytes.

■ The Integrated Management Node keeps a record of events during system operation and it is used for managing the infrastructure solution. No single failure can impact the operation of the system.

■ Different type of nodes can be used to realize the optimal configuration that fits your environment.

■ The true parallel scale-out architecture of FORTISSIMO FOUDATION, with numerous storage nodes and distributed data storage, is extended not only to Disks but also the DRAM memory. It provides a fault-tolerant architecture with complete redundancy of hardware, software and data.

RONNIEE Data

Plane

CPUsX86 64 bit CPU with PCIe Gen3

Memory:Perfect balanced memory for data and computation

Disks:

SSDs

and Hybrids

DC or Client I/O fabricNetwork Card (10-40 Gbit/ETH, IB)

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Extremely Simple, Scalable, Flexible

Incredibly easy central management

with comprehensive supportFORTISSIMO FOUNDATION’s comprehensive platform administration via web GUI is the easiest enterprise level system to manage. The integrated GUI is used to manage the entire system, including the ZFS file system , with no command lines or management expertise needed. The management tool is the central entity for software deployment as well as for tasks like network and cluster management. In addition, enhanced functions have been integrated to make configuration and other tasks trivial.

Key advantages:■ Easy, time-saving management even for inexperienced administrators■ Reduced costs for administration and maintenance■ Configuration of the entire system in minutes (including memory aggregation and advanced features organization)■ Visual management of the entire system■ Tuning of the performance with unique graphical intuitive tools

Thanks to its innovative scale-out architecture, FORTISSIMO FOUNDATION is

the ideal solution for all applications that demand effective performance in

response to exploding data growth

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Use Cases Requirement Benefits

■ Zero downtime, high quality of service, multi-level HA■ Maintenance and component replacement without

interrupting operations■ Linear scalability on demand■ No application migration costs■ Consistent high performance, even for large numbers of

users■Multi-level in memory architecture■ Scale out native DRAM in memory disk support ■Multi-level tiering for unmatchable price performance■ Unique parallel scale out ZFS file system implementation

(Uniquely transforms standard ZFS in a high performance distribute parallel file system!)■ Integration with databases and computational framework for

new levels of converged application performance■ Reduced costs of setup, integration and management■ Specific Database Hardware acceleration■MySQL Acceleration starting from single node (converged)■ Cassandra Acceleration starting from single node (converged)■ High I/O performance for video and audio streaming■ High-performance data access■ Scalable bandwidth and IOPS

Leverage business goals and predictive analytics to realize real-time context and maximize the value of every customer interaction

Minimize overhead and IT costs incurred from business change with rich user applications to manage, monitor, and refine decisions

High-volume, high-speed front-line decisions that must be made in real-time with big data and analytics that are actionable and operational

Offering storage and converged commuting capacity with high flexibility, availability, performance and efficiency

Accelerate applications “in memory” providing unique hardware data path acceleration

Intensive Data Analysis

Databases

Media & Entertainment

Extensive research and development projectsPredictive simulations where access to more

memory allows more sophisticated models to

be used and larger problems to be solved.

Complex database query searching,

particularly in applications where the results or

findings are used to direct the next step in a

process. Security Inspection at many levels.

Real-time analytics, such as fraud detection

and compliance enforcement or the

personalization of an online experience during

a customer’s site visit, based on patterns

found in very large datasets

Hyper-Converged Storage System

FORTISSIMO FOUNDATION

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High I/O performance for video and audio streaming