SmartX Blog

Founder Fubon Fund: Database Disaster Recovery and Storage Resource Pool with SmartX HCI

Founder Fubon Fund is the first cross-strait joint venture fund management company approved by China Securities Regulatory Commission. The company previously adopted traditional virtualization architecture to support its business systems, resulting in the frequent occurrence of storage system single points of failure. In addition, the company’s DR (disaster recovery) plan for the data center was quite complicated, with databases of CC, risk control and valuation systems running on physical servers in a cluster of multiple database instances. Also, as the company had been using EMC VNX 5600 with hybrid storage for a long period of time, the configuration was relatively outdated and the performance did not match business needs.

Company News

SmartX Recognized as Competitive Provider in Gartner’s 2022 Chinese HCI Landscape

Gartner has published the report Competitive Landscape: Chinese HCI Large, Specialist, and Crossover Vendors, in which SmartX is identified as a competitive provider in the Chinese HCI market in 2022 due to superior product reliability and performance. This marks the company’s second appearance in this report, following its appearance in Gartner’s first report on the Chinese HCI landscape in 2019.

Technical Solutions

Multi-Tenancy in Kubernetes: Implementation and Optimization

In this article, we will discuss issues around multi-tenancy in Kubernetes. In particular, we will thoroughly examine the two implementations of multi-tenancy – cluster sharing and multi-cluster – and provide suggestions for enterprises caught in a bind.

Products In Depth

VMware vs SmartX: Distributed Storage Caching Mechanism and Performance Comparison

In this article, we will compare the caching mechanisms of vSAN (using vSAN 7 as an example) and SmartX distributed block storage component ZBS*. Following that, a comparison of VM performance based on these two caching mechanisms is performed to disclose their business impacts.

Company News

SmartX Q3 Market Progress and Highlights：Products, Events and Cases

In Q3 2022, SmartX released Virtink and SMTX Backup & Recovery, providing enterprises with advanced virtualization management for Kubernetes and enhanced data protection for HCI. In August, we also hosted the SmartX HCI Webinar which gave a full walkthrough of our product. Furthermore, we continued to assist companies in financial services, healthcare, and manufacturing with digital transformation of IT infrastructure and business upgrades.

Technical Solutions

How to Lower the Overall Cost and Management Complexity of Oracle Disaster Recovery?

Many enterprises now use Oracle Database to support mission-critical applications. A database with high availability helps ensure business continuity. That’s why companies would also reinforce Disaster Recovery (DR) for Oracle Databases to enable quick switching during a failure or disaster, thereby avoiding business disruption.

Products In Depth

Exploring the Architecture of ZBS – SmartX Distributed Block Storage

In this article, we will describe the storage architecture of SmartX distributed block storage ZBS, focusing on its key capabilities and how we achieve them.

Products In Depth

Explore Product Features Behind SmartX HCI’s Critical Capabilities

We introduced the 4 critical capabilities of SmartX HCI in our August webinar, including 1) investment on demand and quick resource allocation, 2) support multiple hypervisors and hardware, 3) support mission-critical applications, and 4) intelligent operations and maintenance with zero downtime. But how does SmartX achieve these critical capabilities?

Products In Depth

SmartX Releases SMTX Backup & Recovery, Enhancing Enterprise-Level Data Protection for HCI

Today, SmartX releases SMTX Backup & Recovery, a new product that provides backup and recovery solutions and enterprise-level data protection for data center workloads running on SmartX IT infrastructure (including SmartX HCI). SMTX Backup & Recovery 1.0 focuses on backing up virtual machines running on SmartX native ELF virtualization platform, to external NAS servers.

Cases and Insights

Smart, Simple and Stable: Modernize Remote Factory IT Infrastructure with SmartX HCI

Generally, large and mid-size manufacturing companies have multiple factories distributed nationwide and even worldwide, to accomplish manufacturing tasks. Most factories are using information systems like MES for an effective execution of manufacturing operations and to keep connection with headquarters.

Products In Depth

VMware vs SmartX: Snapshot Mechanism and I/O Performance Comparison

To help readers gain a better understanding of how snapshot works in VM and impacts I/O performance, we will evaluate VMware vSphere snapshots’ and SmartX SMTX OS (SmartX’s core HCI software) snapshot’s technical mechanism. We’ll also compare the snapshot performance of the two software through the test.

Cases and Insights

Xuanwu Hospital: Leveraging HCI to Support Critical Systems and Accelerate Digital Transformation

In this interview, Liang Zhigang, Director of Information Center of Xuanwu Hospital, shared the overall achievements of digital transformation at Xuanwu Hospital, reasons for choosing HCI as IT infrastructure and SmartX as HCI vendor, and how SmartX HCI provides support to mission-critical applications as well as digitalization of hospital services.

Cases and Insights

Minmetals Futures: Achieving IT Infrastructure Dynamic Upgrade and Cross-Cluster Management Through HCI

In this article, we explore how Minmetals Futures achieved a seamless upgrade of IT infrastructure hardware and the unified management of multiple data centers across China.

Cases and Insights

Shenwan Hongyuan Securities: An In-depth Transformation From Legacy Virtualization to Hyperconvergence

In this article, we share how we accomplished the digital transformation of IT infrastructure by replacing legacy virtualization with hyperconvergence, and specify various values we have gained since we used hyperconvergence to support mission-critical application systems.

Products In Depth

Automatic Data Recovery Policy: Stabilizing Application Performance While Accelerating Data Recovery

As far as we know, the ultimate performance of a distributed storage cluster is physically decided by its hardware configuration. However, if unexpectable problems such as hard disk and node failures happen and trigger the data recovery during business rush hours, users may find themselves facing a hard choice: which should be the priority, accelerating data recovery or optimizing business performance?

Products In Depth

Virtink: A Lightweight Virtualization Add-on for Kubernetes

Today, we are excited to announce the Virtink project, an open-source and lightweight virtualization add-on for Kubernetes.

Products In Depth

Unprecedented Scalability: Explore SmartX HCI’s Flexible Scale-out Options

Due to the limitation of centralized storage, it’s usually difficult and risky for the IT infrastructure based on legacy virtualization architecture to scale out. Hyperconvergence, on the contrary, enables flexible expansion and on-demand investment as it streamlines the architecture by converging compute virtualization and distributed storage. This is one of the most critical reasons why more enterprises are turning to HCI.

Products In Depth

SPDK Vhost-user: Improve I/O Storage Performance in Hyperconvergence

In this article, we focus on SPDK Vhost-user and explain how to leverage this technology to improve the I/O performance of Virtio-BLK/Virtio-SCSI storage in KVM. In particular, we tested vhost-user’s performance on SMTX OS, the SmartX HCI core software.

Cases and Insights

SmartX x Lyniate Rhapsody: Boost Healthcare Integration Engine’s Performance on HCI Platform

Recently, collaborating with Lyniate, SmartX tested the messaging capability of Rhapsody, a healthcare integration engine, on the hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI). After processing more than 3 billion messages, we got impressive results that Rhapsody’s messaging capability boosted by HCI could totally meet the requirement of most Chinese Grade 3A comprehensive hospitals, with the messaging efficiency 5-10 times of that in the production environment.

Company News

SmartX 2022 Q2 Progress and Highlights

In Q2 2022, SmartX made significant progress in expanding the HCI market. Remarkably, we were recognized as the No.1 pure-play vendor in China HCI market and 2022 Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice in APAC for HCI Software. We also released a fully-upgraded HCI product portfolio, and introduced our HCI Kit Community Edition. In addition, we continued to work closely with financial service institutes and healthcare institutions and provided HCI solutions with high performance, flexible scalability and easy O&M.

Company News

SmartX Releases Upgraded HCI for Modern IT Infrastructure

SmartX, a modern IT infrastructure innovator, has released the newly upgraded SmartX HCI – a hyperconverged infrastructure product portfolio that includes core software SMTX OS, management platform CloudTower, and HCI appliance SMTX Halo. The upgrades include new features to provide optimized performance, security, and management simplicity. With upgraded SmartX HCI, customers can embrace more efficient IT infrastructure while saving up to 50% on costs and focusing on their business priorities.

Products In Depth

SmartX Releases HCI Kit Community Edition

SmartX, a modern IT infrastructure innovator, has released the HCI Kit Community Edition, a free version of its hyperconvergence product SmartX HCI. The Community Edition includes core HCI software SMTX OS and management platform CloudTower. It is freely available, easy-to-deploy, feature-rich, and community-supported, providing easy access to hyperconvergence for worldwide users.

Company News

SmartX Releases CloudTower 2.0: Enhances Simplicity and Security for Operations & Maintenance

SmartX has released CloudTower 2.0, a central management platform for multiple clusters across data centers. CloudTower is a crucial member of the SmartX HCI product portfolio, providing visibility and easy management across all HCI clusters. With new features including cross-cluster VM migration, content library, VM user view, access control and security settings, and an optimized interface, CloudTower 2.0 has improved the efficiency, security, and user experience for operations and maintenance.

Company News

Wenhao Xu, SmartX: “threats are ubiquitous, which is a major problem for businesses”

Recently, Cybernews has interviewed Wenhao Xu, CEO and Co-founder of SmartX, on how to modernize the IT infrastructure to protect businesses from ubiquitous threats. Below is a full report published on cybernews.com.

Products In Depth

Hyperconvergence vs. Legacy VMware Virtualization Infrastructure: Four Differences and Five Advantages

In this article we would answer these questions by explaining the differences between the hyperconverged and legacy VMware virtualization infrastructure.

Cases and Insights

Zhejiang Mingri Holding Group: A Leading Digital Enterprise Empowered by HCI

As a 24-year-old plastic raw material distributor, Zhejiang Mingri Holding Group not only leads the Chinese market, but also the digital transformation within traditional industries. Since 2018, Mingri has been upgrading their IT infrastructure and gradually moved mission-critical platforms to SmartX HCI through three phases.

Cases and Insights

Hyperconvergence: A CIO’s Secret of Hospital Digital Transformation

Foshan Women and Children Hospital is the first Grade 3A maternity and child health hospital in Foshan city of China. It has a long and well-earned reputation for women’s and children’s healthcare. In 2011, the hospital successfully carried out the first open fetal surgery in Asia. By 2019, the hospital ranked 21st among its counterpart hospitals in China. Now it has been developed into a large hospital with three branches.

Products In Depth

How to achieve seamless and zero-downtime upgrade of IT infrastructure software and hardware?

As anyone who has worked as an IT infrastructure administrator knows, upgrades of software, hardware, and patches can always be nightmares. This is because IT infrastructure upgrades may incur unexpected problems and cause system outages, which can be a catastrophe to critical business — with a massive loss not limited to revenue and reputation. So most companies would avoid upgrading their IT infrastructure too often.

Company News

SmartX Recognized as 2022 Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice in APAC for HCI Software

On April 28, SmartX was recognized as Asia/Pacific Customers’ Choice in the 2022 Gartner Peer Insights “Voice of the Customer”: Hyperconverged Infrastructure Software. This is the 2nd year that SmartX has been named an APAC Customers’ Choice in this field.

Company News

IDC Report: SmartX’s HCI Market Share is on the Rise

SmartX Ranked 1st in China HCI SW Financial Vertical Market for 2 Consecutive Years

Company News

SmartX 2022 Q1 Progress and Highlights

In Q1 2022, SmartX released the Network and Security component for HCI to support the “Zero Trust” strategy. We continued to work closely with financial service institutes and public health institutions, providing innovative and easy-to-use HCI to Yingda Asset Management, Jiangsu Suning Bank, The First People’s Hospital of Shunde, etc., to support databases, integrated platforms, and other core systems.

Company News

SMTX ZBS Achieves VMware VAAI Block Certification

SmartX recently announced that its distributed block storage product SMTX ZBS has achieved the VMware vSphere® Storage APIs for Array Integration (VAAI) Block Certification. This enables SmartX to provide more efficient services to its customers by preventing the overhead on ESXi and improving overall performance.

Cases and Insights

Yingda Asset Management: From 1.8bn to 100bn, the innovative IT infrastructure behind a booming business

In recent years, the business scale of Yingda Asset Management has grown 54 times, from 1.8 billion yuan to 100 billion yuan. The secret of Yinda’s success lies in the SmartX HCI which supports its production data center and disaster recovery data center. We invited Xia Yan, Vice President of the Internet Finance Department of Yingda Asset Management, to share Yingda’s perspectives and practices on the upgrade of IT infrastructure.

Products In Depth

SmartX Releases Network and Security Component of HCI, to Support “Zero Trust” Cloud Infrastructure

SmartX has announced the addition of a new Network and Security component to its hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI). With micro-segmentation at its core, the new component aims to help customers secure east-west traffic in various virtualization scenarios, enhance network security inside data centers, and build “zero trust” enterprise cloud infrastructure.

Market Trends

SmartX Named A Fast Mover in GigaOm Radar for Enterprise HCI

GigaOm, a leading analyst firm, has released the latest GigaOm Radar for Hyperconverged Infrastructures: Enterprise Deployments report, covering 8 different global vendors, in which SmartX is the only China-based vendor, named a “Fast Mover” with focus on feature and innovation.

Company News

SmartX Stands Out in Gartner’s First Chinese SDS Competitive Landscape

Gartner has released its first “Competitive Landscape: Chinese Infrastructure Software-defined Storage Vendors”. A total of 9 major local vendors competing in the Chinese iSDS market were covered in the report, including SmartX, Huawei, H3C, and Inspur, etc. The market competing capabilities of 4 pure-play iSDS vendors (incl. SmartX) were analyzed in detail.

Company News

Update for Apache Log4j Vulnerability Issue

SmartX is aware of the recently disclosed security issue relating to the open-source Apache Log4j. We are actively monitoring this issue, and so far we’ve confirmed that the HCI software SMTX OS and the distributed storage software SMTX ZBS are not affected.

Products In Depth

SmartX Releases SMTX ZBS 5.0, Sets A New Performance Benchmark for Distributed Block Storage

SmartX has released the newest version of SMTX ZBS (version 5.0), an upgrade of its leading distributed block storage product specifically designed and developed for production environments.

Company News

IOMesh Completes Compatibility Certification for Alauda Container Platform

SmartX and Alauda recently announced that the compatibility certification has been achieved for the persistent storage solution for containers. According to a test result, SmartX’s cloud native storage product IOMesh is fully compatible with Alauda Container Platform (ACP) V3.4.1.

Market Trends

How Can HCI Reduce Carbon Impact of Data Centers (Explained and Calculated)

“Global warming isn’t a prediction. It is happening.” In August, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released the first chapter of its Sixth Assessment Report (AR6), announcing global warming is soon expected to breach the 1.5C threshold.

Company News

SmartX Joins Cloud Native Computing Foundation

October 13, 2021, LOS ANGELES, Calif. – Today at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America, CNCF announced that SmartX has joined as a silver member to continuously contribute to the development of cloud native technologies. With our leading cloud native storage product IOMesh as a foundation, SmartX will accelerate the development of a series of technologies including containers as well as cloud native storage and network.

Company News

SmartX IOMesh Achieves Red Hat OpenShift Certification

BEIJING, China, Sep. 29, 2021 – IOMesh by SmartX, a cloud-native storage product specifically designed and developed for Kubernetes, announced today it has achieved Red Hat OpenShift certification, and is officially available on Red Hat Ecosystem Catalog.

Products In Depth

Outperforming Peer Products, IOMesh Takes Cloud Native Storage to the Next Level

Preview version of IOMesh, a cloud-native storage product specifically designed and developed for Kubernetes, was released today. Committed to accelerating the containerization journey of stateful applications such as databases, IOMesh possesses cloud-native characteristics including containerized deployment, automatic operation, declarative APIs, and demonstrates excellent performance: in TPC-C MySQL test under the same hardware conditions and test parameters, IOMesh achieved TPS 2.81 times that of Portworx.

Company News

SmartX Upgrades SMTX ZBS to Boost Storage Performance for Mission-Critical Applications

SmartX releases the newest version of SMTX ZBS (v5.0.0), an upgrade of its leading distributed block storage product. With significantly enriched functionality and improved performance, SMTX ZBS provides more stable, performant, and reliable storage services for third-party computing platforms, helping enterprises to build a strong IT infrastructure to support mission-critical applications.

Market Trends

IDC Report: SmartX Ranked No.1 in China HCI SW Financial Vertical Market

What’s New: According to IDC’s “2020Q4 China SDS and HCI Market Overview”, China HCI SW Market reached a 51.8% YoY growth in 2020, with a total market scope of US $345.5M. Financial vertical market reached 62.2% YoY growth, in which SmartX was ranked No.1 with 17.2% market share, exceeding competitors including Huawei, Sangfor, Dell, etc.

Market Trends

SmartX Halo P series, our Ultra-Low Latency HCI Appliance Entered Top 5 Finalists of TechTarget’s Storage Magazine & SearchStorage.com 2020 – Storage Products of the Year

Recently, the editors of TechTarget’s Storage Magazine & SearchStorage.com selected the finalists of the annual Products of the Year Awards for 2020, and SmartX Halo P series appliance was recognized as a finalist in Hyper-converged & Composable Infrastructure.

Products In Depth

SmartX Releases First HCI Solution Using Intel Optane PMEM in App Direct Mode to Achieve Ultra-low Latency

Leading hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) provider SmartX announced its latest high-performance, low-latency HCI solution and SmartX Halo P series appliance built with SmartX’s core software SMTX OS and Intel® Optane™ persistent memory (PMEM). For the first time in the industry, SmartX has…

Market Trends

SmartX Named in Forrester Now Tech: Hyperconverged Infrastructure Report

Leading Hyper-Converged Infrastructure provider SmartX announced that it has been included in Forrester’s recently released report Now Tech: Hyperconverged Infrastructure, Q2 2020.

Market Trends

Gartner Acknowledges SmartX’s Competitive Diffentiation for its Indigenous Core Technologies and Production Readiness

Recently, leading HyperConverged Infrastructure (HCI) and distributed block storage solution provider SmartX has been recognized by Gartner as one of the most distinctive companies to drive the digital infrastructure revolution in its latest report “Competitive Landscape: Hyperconverged Infrastructure, China”. The report highlights two competitive edges that differentiate SmartX from industry peers, which are “full control of its core technologies” and “production readiness”.

Cases and Insights

How to “Cook a Bowl of Good Noodles” with SmartX HCI?

Famous noodle chain store Jiumaojiu has chosen SmartX Hyper Converged Infrastructure (HCI) to migrate and expand its existing infrastructure to power its business expansion across 140+ chain restaurants in 7 cities in China.

Cases and Insights

Wanjiale Builds Agile and Modernized IT with SmartX HCI

Wanjiale, a household name of central water heaters in China, has leveraged SmartX Hyper Converged Infrastructure (HCI) to build a modernized IT infrastructure to be fully geared for smart manufacturing and e-retail, as the digital transformation gains momentum.

Products In Depth

SmartX ZBS CSI Driver Officially Merged on K8s Drivers List

SmartX announced that the Container Storage Interface (CSI) driver of its distributed storage platform SMTX ZBS has been added on Kubernetes CSI production drivers list so as to integrate block storage system with Kubernetes containerized environment. Enterprise users can not only leverage SMTX ZBS to build private cloud and hyper-converged infrastructure system, but also introduce persistent storage into stateful applications on Kubernetes.

Products In Depth

Intel Optane SSD Enhances Performance of SmartX HCI for OracleDB

A recent joint lab testing by SmartX and Intel finds out that SMTX OS, core software of SmartX, combined with Intel 2nd Gen Xeon Scalable Processors and Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X can create a hyperconverged infrastructure that produces significant system performance gains and reduces the latency for low IO queue depth, mission-critical workloads such as Oracle Database.

Cases and Insights

BOE Builds Streamlined and Agile VDI with SmartX HCI

China’s leading IoT and intelligent interface products and services provider BOE Technology announced that it has built the next-generation desktop cloud platform with SmartX’s Hyper Converged Infrastructure (HCI) Solution for agile, high-performance, scalable and easy-to-maintain infrastructure architecture.

Technical Solutions

SmartX Announces Joint Solution with Rancher

Leading Hyper Converged Infrastructure (HCI) provider SmartX announces that it partners with Rancher Labs to launch a joint solution which delivers production-proven distributed block storage and HCI platform for container architecture, at The 3rd Enterprise Container Innovation Conference (abbreviated as “ECIC”) held by Rancher Labs.

Cases and Insights

Futures Firms Reply to the Changing Market with SmartX HCI

Futures market in China has gone through drastic changes from 2018. With increasing globalization, the competition among the brokers has been growing even fiercer. In 2018, China’s financial watchdogs issued new regulations and policies, bringing both opportunities and challenges to the market…

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