Toshiba launches KumoScale storage software

“DAS SSD built cloud solutions are cost efficient and easy to deploy”, noted Paul Rowan, General Manager for the SSD business unit of Toshiba Memory Europe. “The fixed nature of DAS may limit the flexibility promised by the adoption of containers and orchestration frameworks. The new KumoScale software allows cloud data centres to scale and to provide for server and flash storage independently. This helps to accommodate unexpected and peak workloads, and data centres will be able to respond to new revenue opportunities with the needed agility and increased efficiency.”

“We are delighted having Toshiba as a technology partner in the e-shelter Innovation Lab. As part of our collaboration, Toshiba provides the all new KumoScale to enterprises and partners with an increased flexibility and efficiency. The ability to execute containerized workloads in a fully automated manner with the performance of NVMe-oF will enable a better performance for data center scale container users.” said Toan Nguyen, Director Business Development & Cloud Platform, e-shelter services GmbH

The technology behind KumoScale was first introduced by TMA last year and subsequently certified as the only NVMe-oF-compliant storage target software by the University of New Hampshire InterOperability Laboratory, the leading testing and certification lab for NVMe technology and software. KumoScale software manages all system functionality, enabling the creation of networked storage nodes that can be immediately deployed at scale – delivering improved utilization of powerful 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.

Commenting on KumoScale’s ability to enable improved server and SSD capacity utilization while lending revenue agility, Eric Burgener, Research Vice President for Storage in the Enterprise Platforms, Storage & Network Infrastructure Group for IDC, noted that, “For many cloud deployments, CPU and storage bottlenecks have hampered performance and storage scalability. Toshiba's KumoScale software provides increased efficiencies in CapEx and application flexibility. New cloud-based architectures running real-time analytics, financial applications and NoSQL databases can leverage disaggregated NVMe-oF to alleviate these bottlenecks – and gain the full benefit of containerized, orchestrated environments.”