The Flashbox™ is a great example of how Kalray’s DPU-based smart storage cards can be leveraged to build unique storage solutions.
Kalray Flashbox™ is the first disaggregated NVMe storage array that has been designed from the ground up to leverage the full potential of NVMe flash devices at massive scale, while ensuring the lowest storage Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).
Featuring the Kalray K200-LP™ Smart Target Controller card with Kalray MPPA® DPU, Flashbox™ enables customers to unlock the performance of NVMe SSDs at scale, while meeting reliability and efficiency requirements for their businesses. Built on an off-the-shelf appliance, the solution addresses the key challenges of scale-out NVMe storage: scalability, performance, cost-efficiency, high availability and ease of use.
The Flashbox™ is available with our design partners or as a reference platform to design your own solutions.
Two Options: Turnkey or Build-Your-Own
Kalray Flashbox™ Overview
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Ideal for Disaggregation
Kalray’s Flashbox™ is a break-through solution for high-performance, scale-out NVMe storage.
The disaggregated architecture of Flashbox™ unleashes the full capabilities of NVMe SSDs: physical devices are abstracted into one scalable pool of high-performance storage and logical volumes can be allocated to applications across the network as if they were locally attached. -
MPPA® DPU
Kalray’s Flashbox™ differentiates from other scale-out NVMe solutions in that all critical storage services run on one single chip in the disaggregated storage appliance: the Kalray MPPA® DPU, a new generation of data-centric processors delivering an unprecedented level of performance and programmability.
This is significantly more cost-efficient, and gives much higher performance, than traditional x86 based architectures, which see reduced performance efficiency due to data the processing bottleneck when adding storage services.
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Low TCO
Flashbox™ enables efficient NVMe disaggregation, resulting in the most optimal utilization of NVMe resources. Because all storage services run locally on the Kalray DPU, the performance overhead is reduced to an absolute minimum.
As the DPU was designed to minimize power consumption, power savings compared to alternative processors can be as high as 15x.
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Ease of Use
Kalray’s Flashbox™ revolutionizes how customers use and store high-performance data without compromising on high-availability and scalability. FlashBox™ runs on standard hardware and leverages industry standard protocols (NVMe-oF, NVMe-oF over Ethernet), making it very easy for customers to deploy in existing environments.
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Openness
Kalray’s Flashbox™ comes with Kalray Storage AccessCore® SDK, an open software environment based on the industry standard SPDK. With Kalray’s Flashbox™, customers get both performance and software openness.
Use Cases
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Flashbox™ Use CaseFeeding Data-hungry GPUs for AI and Machine Learning
Kalray's Flashbox™ is the first disaggregated NVMe storage array for AI, Machine Learning and Deep Learning workloads that has been designed from the ground up to leverage the full potential of NVMe flash devices at massive scale. It enables data scientists to unlock the performance of NVMe SSDs at scale and feed their data-hungry GPU's.
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Flashbox™ Use CaseBoosting Parallel File System Performance for High Performance Computing
Flashbox™ integrates with all popular parallel file systems and guarantees the highest performance per $ and Watt.

Technical Corner / Kalray Flashbox™ Specifications
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Hardware Specifications
HARDWARE SPECIFICATIONS 2RU, 19” rack support with rails Two I/O modules – six fans Up to 6 adapters Up to 12 100GbE ports 24x U2 dual-ported NVMe SSDs Up to 364 TB in 2U with 1.9, 3.8, 7.6 and 15.2 TB SSDs 3-year built-in support -
Software Specifications
SOFTWARE SPECIFICATIONS SPDK-based storage suite RAID 0, 1, 10 and 6 (based on EC algorithms) Logical Volumes Thin provisioning Snapshots Clones NVMe-oF (RoCEv1/v2) NVMe/TCP Active/active or active-standby, highly available configuration Configurable In-band or out-of-band system management -
Power and Cooling Specifications
POWER AND COOLING SPECIFICATIONS Power: 2 AC & DC 1600W power modules with 2 independent AC power input Operating temperature: 0°C to 45°C RoHS compliant Dimensions: 87mm H x 438mm W x 697mm D 3.43 in H x 17.2in. W x 27.44 in. D Weight: 25.5 Kg
