Today at the 2018 Open Compute Project (OCP) U.S. Summit, Toshiba announced the general availability of KumoScale, its new NVMe-oF (NVM Express over Fabrics) shared accelerated storage software.

The introduction of KumoScale software enables the use of NVMe-oF to make flash storage accessible over a data center network, providing a simple and flexible abstraction of physical disks into a pool of block storage, all while preserving the performance of direct-attached NVMe SSDs.

"The cloud was built on Direct Attached Storage (DAS) SSDs due to their low cost and ease of deployment," noted Steve Fingerhut, senior vice president and general manager, SSD and Cloud Software business units for TMA. "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."

The technology behind KumoScale was first introduced by Toshiba last year. KumoScale software manages all system functionality, enabling the creation of networked storage nodes that can be immediately deployed at scale - delivering improved utilization of NVMe SSDs by allowing them to be shared. Additionally, KumoScale paves the way to more efficient use of compute nodes via dynamic orchestration and enables high-performance storage for container orchestration frameworks such as Kubernetes - and can be adapted to in-house developed provisioning systems.

In collaboration with Portworx, the cloud native storage management solution for Kubernetes, KumoScale provides a solution for making containerized big data, fast data and machine learning workloads easier to manage and higher performing. Portworx provides Kubernetes storage that is dynamically provisioned, highly available, automatically backed-up and enables multi-cloud workflows. Running Portworx volumes on top of KumoScale's target namespaces enables the raw performance of NVMe to be efficiently and flexibly configured under the leading orchestration framework.