Fungible, which was co-founded by Pradeep Sindhu, the founder of Juniper Networks, and Bertrand Serlet, who is perhaps best known for leading the development of Mac OS X and IoS, has as its fundamental building block a new type of processor called a data processing unit, or DPU -- the so-called “third socket” about the CPU and GPU. So far, Fungible has introduced two versions of its DPU:
- Fungible F1 DPU – an 800Gbps processor for high-performance storage, analytics and security platforms, and the
- Fungible S1 DPU – a 200Gbps processor optimized for host-side use cases including bare metal virtualization, storage initiator, NFVi/VNF applications and distributed node security.
Its first shipping product, which was introduced in October 2020, is an NVMe Storage Cluster in a 2RU form factor, and scaling linearly to 300M IOPS in a single 40RU rack. The company says its high-performance design improves $/IOPS significantly by consolidating workloads and increasing utilization of storage media.
The newly-announced Fungible Data Center solution extends this vision to power hyper-disaggregated, composable infrastructure with bare-metal performance for multiple tenants. The solution is orchestrated by Fungible Data Center Composer software, which was developed internally, accelerated through the recent acquisition of Cloudistics. This is accomplished via a single pane of glass management for dynamic workload changes with bare metal performance. Security is maintained with independent hardware-accelerated security domains, fine-grained segmentation, robust QoS and line-rate encryption.
Key elements of the Fungible Data Center include:
- Standard compute and GPU servers equipped with the Fungible Data ServicesPlatform - a standard full-height, half-length PCIe card powered by a Fungible S1 DPU. The Fungible Data Services Platform card comes at three performance points: 200G, 100G and 50G
- Fungible Storage Cluster comprising a cluster of Fungible FS1600 scale-out disaggregated storage nodes, each powered by two Fungible F1 DPUs
- Standard TOR switches and routers for data, BMC and management
- Fungible Data Center Composer - a centralized software suite that enables bare metal composition, provisioning, management and orchestration of infrastructure at all scales
“At Fungible, we believe that if we build a solution that addresses the most challenging requirements in data centers - specifically, hyperscale data centers running the most data-intensive applications, then data centers of all scales, on-premise or cloud, core to edge will reap the benefits as well,” said Pradeep Sindhu, CEO and Co-Founder of Fungible. “Leveraging the Fungible Data Processing Unit™ (DPU), we were able to ‘hyperdisaggregate’ compute and storage resources providing performance, scale and cost efficiencies not even achievable by hyperscalers. Today, we deliver the ‘composable’ piece with the first incarnation of Fungible Data Centers, fully managed by the innovative Fungible Data Center Composer software.”
“The Fungible Data Center Composer is developed by fully harnessing the powerful capabilities of the Fungible DPU,” said Dr. Srinidhi Varadarajan, Senior Vice President of Solutions at Fungible. “The result is a data center architecture that is simple, flexible, high performance and secure. We believe the Fungible Data Center is the inevitable way to build infrastructure because it dynamically adapts to changing workload conditions, while delivering performance equivalent to that of a custom designed bare metal data center per workload.”
“We’ve identified the bottlenecks within our existing distributed infrastructure architectures. To achieve our desired system efficiency targets we are looking to new hardware approaches that better support our infrastructure processing stacks,” said Brad Settlemyer, Sr. Scientist in Los Alamos’ HPC Design group. “The co-design ofsoftware and hardware to support data services and data analysis is integral to meeting our efficiency targets and advancing our national security mission.”
Fungible is also in strategic partnerships with key OEMs to deliver first-class worldwide deployment, support and training, including Supermicro and Juniper Networks.
“Juniper Networks exists to provide an experience-first network for our customers and to simplify the complexities of modern networking so organizations of all sizes can focus on innovating and moving their businesses forward,” said Raj Yavatkar, CTO, Juniper Networks. “We are excited to be working with Fungible to deliver the Fungible Data Center solution. The combination of Juniper and Fungible technology enables consistent quality of service and the high performance required of today’s cloud dat centers without creating more workflows and layers of technology to manage.
