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Mangstor Inc is a storage company founded on 2012 and based at Austin (TX) with a deep expertise in storage and networking, especially in NVMe Flash Storage Solutions to accelerate application workloads in web-scale and enterprise data centers.

They have an interesting storage appliance: the NX-Series is and NVMe over Fabric All Flash Storage Arrays (AFA) that can be deployed centrally and accessed by many servers connected via high-bandwidth, low-latency RDMA networks.

The technical specifications are of NX6320-Series are quite impressive: 2.25 M IOPS of random R/W performance and latency R/W response time around 110 µs / 30 µs!

During the last IT Press Tour #17 I’ve got the opportunity to learn more about this solution, directly from Paul Prince, CTO at Mangstor, that confirms how flash is a strong inflection point for the storage industry.

They have started with the MX6300 flash card: the fastest PCIe SSD for in-Storage processing and with NVMe plug and play. MX6300 card is capable to 900,000 / 500,000 IOPS ​random R/W Performance with a capacity of ​2.7 TB and a latency R/W response time of 90 µs / 30 µs. The card has been designed and realize by Mangstor, using Toshiba SSD chips.

The NX-Series NVMe over Fabric Flash storage arrays leverage NVMe over RDMA storage software stack combined with the MX-Series devices in off-the-shelf industry-standard server platforms.

As NVME is the new/better interface to local SSDs and is going to replace SATA and SAS interface for flash connection, Mangstor bets that NVME over Fabric (NVMEoF) will be the the new/better interface to storage arrays and can replace FC and iSCSI for SAN.

They belive in the need of a tier 0 storage faster than tier 1 (traditional AFA) and with absolute performance for specific workloads (an example was with MySQL jobs which ran in 24hrs can take only 4-5hrs with this kind of solution).

Of course you need to build the networks and you need specific networks cards, like RoCE v2 cards. For this reason and for simplify the compatibility list there are some bundled kit with Mellanox in order to have a complete solution with storage and the network fabric components).

A final note is about their data services: like some other storage vendor with interesting hardware solution, they are not yet focused on the data services, and storage is mostly “raw”. This mean not only the lack of compression or deduplication (not so interesting if you want to provide a low latency storage), but also no data protection at all! The storage works like a “RAID0” storage and all the data protection solutions, at this time, should implemented at a high level.

Disclaimer: Condor Consulting Group has invited me to this even and they will paid for accommodation and travels, but I am not compensated for my time and I’m not obliged to blog. Furthermore, the content is not reviewed, approved or published by any other person than me.

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Virtualization, Cloud and Storage Architect. Tech Field delegate. VMUG IT Co-Founder and board member. VMware VMTN Moderator and vExpert 2010-20 and vExpert Pro. Dell TechCenter Rockstar 2014-15. Microsoft MVP 2014-16. Veeam Vanguard 2015-19. Nutanix NTC 2014-20. Several certifications including: VCDX-DCV, VCP-DCV/DT/Cloud, VCAP-DCA/DCD/CIA/CID/DTA/DTD, MCSA, MCSE, MCITP, CCA, NPP.