Fungible DPU Software

To learn more, visit: https://www.fungible.com/

Follow us on Twitter:   / fungible_inc  
Follow us on LinkedIn:   / fungible-inc.  

#datacenter #technology #cloud #network #data #datacentric #datacenterarchitecture #datacentricsw #softwarearchitecture #fungible_inc


The Fungible DPU Software - a suite of software solutions that provides an agile, out-of-box and future-proof experience for Fungible DPU users. One of the key innovations in the Fungible DPU is a data-path engine that can execute data-centric computations at extremely high speeds. Data-centric computations include network, storage, security, virtualization functions that run on the datapath. This data-path engine is fully programmable. The Fungible DPU data-path engine comprises hundreds of hardware threads that can execute these data-centric computations. The programmability of the datapath engine allows the Fungible DPU to take on different distinct personalities and even multiple personalities at once!

Let’s take a look at the first persona, where the Fungible DPU sits in a PCIe target such as a storage, AI and analytics server. The Fungible DPU acts as a root complex to PCIe devices such as SSDs, GPUs and FPGAs. In the storage target, the Fungible DPU takes the place of the NIC and the CPU-based storage controller, serving as a full-featured high performance storage controller for NVMe SSDs. The Fungible DPU in fact, enables a pool of disaggregated SSDs to be presented as a large SSD vended over the network via NVMe-over-Fabrics protocols to host servers. To support this persona, the Fungible DPU is programmable to support a multitude of functions; To efficiently support ingress and egress data interchange, the Fungible DPU supports modern protocols such as NVMe and NVMe-over-Fabrics.

The Fungible DPU also fully implements the storage stack, supporting raw and durable volumes, storage services such as compression, deduplication, snapshots, cloning and security services such as encryption. To complement the Fungible DPU on the storage target, the Fungible DPU can also be integrated into host servers, serving as a bare-metal NVMe-over-Fabrics storage initiator. The Fungible DPU translates NVMe to NVMe-over-Fabrics, making NVMe remote storage appear local to the host servers. The Fungible DPU also executes data services such as end-to-end encryption for data security, and compression for more efficient network bandwidth utilization.

On the host side, the Fungible DPU can take on multiple other personas. A use case that is surging in popularity is bare metal virtualization or BMV. BMV allows applications to achieve performance close to that of “bare metal servers”, making this use case highly attractive for applications that are performance and latency sensitive. BMV is realized by offloading functions such as IO virtualization, networking, storage and security functions into the Fungible DPU. The Fungible DPU supports data interchange through PCIe SRIOV and IO virtualization in hardware. It also offers full programmability of networking, storage and security services.

Firstly, the Fungible DPU offers the flexibility to customize network functions and protocols, for example virtual switching, routing, network overlays, load balancing and so on. Secondly, the Fungible DPU offloads the storage stack from the CPU, supporting both local and remote storage, while also enabling storage data services such as compression, encryption and analytics. Thirdly, the Fungible DPU supports stateful firewall, authentication and cryptographic protocols such as IPsec and TLS, deep packet inspection and so on.

To support this level of flexibility, the Fungible DPU supports eBPF programming. eBPF programming provides small pinhole APIs that allow users to customize specific functionality, to name a few examples - checking the validity of a packet, modifying encapsulation of packet headers, customizing compression algorithms. Next, the Fungible DPU can also serve as a standalone security appliance or a distributed security node in host servers. In both use cases, the Fungible DPU operates as a security hub that delivers comprehensive protection for data entering and exiting data centers, and data moving laterally within the servers in the data centers. The Fungible DPU can also act as a look-aside accelerator, offloading the CPU for functions such as encryption, asymmetric cryptography, compression for both text and images, deep packet inspection and filtering.

The Fungible software suite includes drivers for the host OS and accelerator libraries that will allow the host to offload these functions into the Fungible DPU. Lastly, while the Fungible DPU is designed for massively scale-out composable disaggregated infrastructure, the Fungible DPU can also supercharge your hyperconverged infrastructure! Combining multiple personas, the PCIe ports can be configured to support both root complex and endpoint.