Researchers have obliterated the record for fastest storage ever

data center
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Dutch high-performance computing (HPC) researchers have managed to achieve a speed of 6.55 million random read IOPS using a storage node designed by Fungible.

According to Fungible, a storage start-up based in California, the test results represent the highest recorded performance between a single server reading data and a single storage target - almost double the previous best.

“What we are achieving in the lab…can be deployed throughout the world...Ultimately, it is revolutionizing the performance, economics, reliability and security of scale-out data centres,” said Pradeep Sindhu, CEO and co-founder of Fungible.

Reporting on the development, Blocks & Files says the record was achieved using the company’s FS1600 storage node powered by a Data Processing Unit (DPU) designed by Fungible itself.

Offloading storage logic

The test was conducted jointly by SURF, an association of Dutch educational and research institutions, and Nikhef, a partnership between the Institutes Organization of the Dutch Research Council and six universities.

According to reports, Nikhef is on the hunt for a fast and affordable data processing mechanism with a view to efficiently process the data flowing from experiments at CERN when the High-Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC) accelerator becomes operational in 2026.

In the Dutch test, the FS1600 storage node, placed inside a 2U, 24-slot NVMe SSD box with two F1 DPU controllers, was used together with a 64-core AMD-powered server over a NVMe-over Fabrics connection.

Fungible claims the technology can be scaled linearly and deliver up to 300 million IOPS in a single 40 RU rack. 

The company claims that the results show that FS1600 helps decrease cost per IOPS, further improving the utilization of storage media, as compared to existing software-defined storage solutions, which makes them useful for all kinds of data-centric workloads.

Mayank Sharma

With almost two decades of writing and reporting on Linux, Mayank Sharma would like everyone to think he’s TechRadar Pro’s expert on the topic. Of course, he’s just as interested in other computing topics, particularly cybersecurity, cloud, containers, and coding.

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