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What is Simplyblock?

Simplyblock is a high-performance, distributed storage orchestration layer designed for cloud-native environments. It provides NVMe over TCP (NVMe/TCP) block storage to hosts and offers block storage to containers through its Container Storage Interface (CSI) and ProxMox drivers.

What makes Simplyblock Special?

  • Environment Agnostic: Simplyblock operates seamlessly across major cloud providers, regional, and specialized providers, bare-metal and virtual provisioners, and private clouds, including both virtualized and bare-metal Kubernetes environments.

  • NVMe-Optimized: Simplyblock is built from scratch around NVMe. All internal and external storage access is entirely based on NVMe and NVMe over Fabric (TCP, RDMA). This includes local back-storage on storage nodes, host-to-cluster, and node-to-node traffic. Together with the user-space data plane, distributed data placement, and advanced quality of service (QoS) and other characteristics, this makes simplyblock the storage platform with the most advanced performance guarantees in hyper-converged solutions available today.

  • User-Space Data Plane: Simplyblock data plane is built entirely in user-space with an interrupt-free, lockless, zero-copy architecture with thread-to-core pinning. The hot data path entirely avoids Linux kernel involvement, data copies, dynamic thread scheduling, and inter-thread synchronization. Its deployment is fully numa-node-aware.

  • Advanced QoS: Simplyblock provides not only IOPS or throughput-based caps, but also true QoS service classes, effectively isolating IO traffic.

  • Distributed Data Placement: Simplyblock's advanced data placement, which is based on small, fixed-size data chunks, ensures a perfectly balanced utilization of storage, compute, and network bandwidth, avoiding any performance bottlenecks local to specific nodes. This provides almost linear performance scalability for the cluster.

  • Containerized Architecture: The solution comprises:

    • Storage Nodes: Container stacks delivering distributed data services via NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe over TCP), forming storage clusters.
    • Management Nodes: Container stacks offering control and management services, collectively known as the control plane.

  • Platform Support: Simplyblock supports deployment on virtual machines, bare-metal instances, and Kubernetes containers, compatible with x86 and ARM architectures.

  • Deployment Flexibility: Simplyblock offers the greatest deployment flexibility in the industry. It can be deployed hyper-converged, disaggregated, and in a hybrid fashion, combining the best of both worlds.

Customer Benefits Across Industries

Simplyblock offers tailored advantages to various sectors:

  • Financial Services: Enhances data management by boosting performance, strengthening security, and optimizing cloud storage costs.

  • Media and Gaming: Improves storage performance, reduces costs, and streamlines data management, facilitating efficient handling of large media files and gaming data.

  • Technology and SaaS Companies: Provides cost savings and performance enhancements, simplifying storage management and improving application performance without significant infrastructure changes.

  • Telecommunications: Offers ultra-low-latency access to data, enhances security, and simplifies complex storage infrastructures, aiding in the efficient management of customer records and network telemetry.

  • Blockchain and Cryptocurrency: Delivers cost efficiency, enhanced performance, scalability, and robust data security, addressing the unique storage demands of blockchain networks.