Aparna Systems Employs NVMe to Drive Hyperconvergence

At the NFV World Congress 2017 conference today, Aparna Systems unveiled two systems that take advantage of NVMe to pack 10,000 cores into a single 4u rack.

Aparna Systems CEO Sam Mathan says the rise of NVMe presents a unique opportunity to rethink system design in a way that achieves all the benefits of hyperconvergence using an open modular approach that enables the latest generation of Intel processors to be packaged in a cartridge that is about the size of 3.5-in drive. Those cartridges then share access to 20 Gbps of bandwidth per server to achieve an aggregate uplink capacity of 640 Gbps.

The Aparna systems come in two basic forms. The Oserv8 and Oserv16 servers within the Orca µServers line come with eight and 16 cores, respectively. There’s also an Orca µCloud system family that consists of a 4060 model that can be configured with up to 60 µServers and a 4015 model that can be configured with up 15 µServers.

“It’s a totally open high-density appliance,” says Mathan.

Mathan says that what most IT organizations don’t appreciate yet about NMVe is that there’s now enough bandwidth to simultaneously provide compute, storage and networking processing capabilities without requiring them to be handled by entirely separate subsystems. As processing requirements change, Mathan says, IT organizations will be able to dynamically allocate resources on demand across compute, storage and networking. That in turn will drive server utilization rates exponentially higher, says Mathan. In fact, Mathan says that what passes for virtualization and hyperconvergence will soon appear antiquated by comparison.

As systems that employ NVMe start to appear, the level of compute, storage and networking density that can be achieved inside a data center will soon exponentially increase. Those increased levels of density have implications for everything from the amount of energy consumed in a data center to the number of virtual machines and container-based microservices that can be supported in any given environment.

Of course, it may still take a while for IT organizations to finance major forklift upgrades across the data center. But as IT organizations begin to make the transition to NVMe, many of them will discover just how utterly changed the data center is about to become.