---
title: "What is Simplyblock?"
description: "What is Simplyblock?: Simplyblock is a high-performance, distributed storage orchestration layer designed for cloud-native environments."
source: "https://docs.simplyblock.io/latest/architecture/what-is-simplyblock/"
---

# 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 I/O 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.