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What is Kernel Bypass NIC and How Does It Perform in HCI?

Kernel bypass NICs reduce traditional TCP/IP latency by avoiding kernel stack overhead, memory copies, interrupts, and context switches through user-space drivers, zero-copy DMA, polling, and hardware offload. With PCI passthrough and SR-IOV, SmartX ECP lets VMs directly use Solarflare NIC capabilities such as PTP and Onload. In testing, SR-IOV significantly lowered VM network latency, and Onload further reduced it to 2-3 us, enabling low-latency VM deployment for HFT and HPC while reducing hardware cost and power consumption.

SKS 1.6 Released: Supporting Form-Based Visual Management and Full-Stack Domestic IT Innovation

SmartX has officially released SMTX Kubernetes Service (SKS) 1.6, featuring form-based visual Kubernetes management, full-stack domestic IT innovation support, and optimized network isolation. With new support for Kylin OS, TencentOS, Huawei Ascend NPUs, and advanced network isolation, SKS 1.6 empowers enterprises in finance, healthcare, and government sectors to simplify cloud-native O&M while building secure, autonomous infrastructure.

Unveiling SmartX ECP 6.3: How Four Core Innovations Deliver Tier-1 All-Flash Performance

SmartX ECP 6.3 delivers 11M+ IOPS and 130+ GiB/s bandwidth on a three-node HCI cluster through technical advancements across four key dimensions—system kernel, hardware acceleration, storage-network aggregation, and storage scalability. The test results from Hygon and Kunpeng environments also break the industry misconception that “ITAI platforms suffer significant performance degradation.”

Unveiling SmartX ECP 6.3 Upgrades in Availability: Expanding HA to SR-IOV, vGPU, and HCT-Enabled VMs

SmartX ECP 6.3 extends high availability (HA) capabilities to VMs using SR-IOV passthrough NICs, vGPUs, and Hygon HCT devices—addressing a long-standing limitation in hardware-accelerated virtualization scenarios. This blog explores the architecture, HA workflow, competitive advantages over VMware and Nutanix, and real-world deployments in low-latency trading and national cryptography transformation scenarios.

SmartX Named a Representative Vendor in Gartner’s Market Guide for Container Management Platforms in China

SmartX has been named a representative vendor in Gartner’s Market Guide for Container Management Platforms in China, recognizing its growing momentum in AI-native cloud infrastructure. This article explores how SmartX Kubernetes Service (SKS) aligns with emerging trends in GPU orchestration, AI workloads, and unified cloud management—while helping enterprises modernize beyond VMware with integrated VM and container operations on a single platform.

Unveiling SmartX ECP 6.3 Upgrades in Availability: Enhancing High-Performance Workload Reliability with Cross-NIC RDMA HA

SmartX ECP 6.3 introduces cross-NIC, multi-link RDMA bonding to deliver true high availability for latency-sensitive workloads. By combining OVS-based bonding with RDMA software multipathing, it elevates redundancy from port-level to NIC-level, enabling seamless failover without compromising microsecond-level latency. This upgrade addresses long-standing issues such as MAC flapping and unpredictable reconnections, providing financial-grade reliability for mission-critical applications while maintaining high performance.

Replacing VMware vSAN with SmartX Distributed Storage: Comparable Features with Optimized Performance and Stability

As enterprises seek reliable VMware alternatives, SmartX distributed storage (ZBS & SFS) emerges as a high-performance contender. This comparison reveals how SmartX matches vSAN’s enterprise features while delivering superior stability during snapshots, high utilization, and hardware failures. Discover why SmartX is the optimized choice for mission-critical workloads.

SmartX HKMO 2025 Recap: Recognitions, Products & Solutions, Case Studies, and Events

In 2025, SmartX solidified its leadership in the HKMO market, dominating IDC and Gartner rankings for HCI and virtualization. By launching ECP 6.2 and SKS 1.5, SmartX accelerated the global “VMware exit” movement, delivering mission-critical reliability to finance, healthcare, and manufacturing. From robust IT modernization to cutting-edge AI infrastructure, SmartX is no longer just an alternative—it is the new standard for the AI era.

SmartX 2025 Q2 Recap – Recognitions, Products, Solutions, and Cases

In Q2 2025, IDC recognized SmartX for topping China’s HCI software market for the second consecutive year. We continued to innovate our products and solutions, with the release of SKS 1.4 and significant upgrades of the VCCI solution in security management. We also shared compelling customer stories across the financial services and healthcare sectors, showcasing how SmartX ECP enables core system operations, serves as a VMware alternative, and facilitates IT modernization.

SmartX VCCI Solution Upgrade: Securing the Interconnection Between Virtualized and Containerized Applications

SmartX VM-Container Converged Infrastructure (VCCI) solution now supports the unified network security policy management of both VMs and containers. This enhanced feature ensures the efficient interoperability between virtualized and containerized applications while boosting the data security, visualization, and O&M simplicity of the entire SmartX Enterprise Cloud Platform (ECP).

SmartX 2025 Q1 Recap – Recognitions, Products, Solutions, Cases, and Events

In Q1 2025, SmartX continued to be recognized by IDC and Gartner as the leader in China’s HCI Software Market. We released SmartX ECP v6.2 and enhanced various features in security, performance, availability, and O&M support. Facing enterprise demands regarding DeepSeek, we introduced a private deployment solution based on SmartX ECP to accelerate enterprises’ DeepSeek deployment and validation process.

SMTX File Storage in HCI 6.0: Providing Diverse Data Storage Services with One Platform

Recently, SmartX officially launched HCI 6.0, enhancing our Enterprise Cloud Platform (ECP). One of the standout features is the introduction of SMTX File Storage (SFS), which enables SmartX ECP to offer enterprise customers stable, high-performance, and scalable distributed file storage services. With SFS, enterprises can meet diverse data storage needs using a single platform, reducing the costs associated with legacy NAS procurement while boosting storage reliability and performance.

Accurate and Effective: Virtual Machine High Availability in SMTX OS

Featuring the converged deployment of compute and storage, SMTX OS (SmartX hyperconvergence infrastructure software) enhances the effectiveness of VM HA through storage features such as multi-replica strategy and rack awareness (topology-aware data allocation). Additionally, it offers rich VM rebuilding services that enable IT engineers to address various server and VM failure scenarios through an optimized VM HA function.

Kubernetes on VMs vs. Bare Metal: Comparison of Performance

This article presents empirical performance data of Kubernetes running stateful and stateless applications on VMs (SMTX Kubernetes Services, referred to as SKS) and bare-metal servers. Overall, the results demonstrate that SKS shows performance ranging from 82% to 96% of bare-metal-based Kubernetes, indicating that VM-based Kubernetes can effectively meet the requirements of the majority of containerized applications in production environments.

Shield Your Business from Ransomware with SmartX HCI: Detect, Isolate, Recover

To help customers defend against ransomware attacks, SmartX has introduced HCI 5.1 portfolio with upgraded anti-ransomware capabilities. Leveraging SmartX observability platform (based on CloudTower), software-defined network and security product – Everoute, and SMTX Backup & DR, organizations can protect their systems from ransomware through a three-stage strategy: actively detect ransomware attacks, isolate infected VMs, and recover data in a secure environment.

2023 SmartX Recap: Products, Recognitions, and Customer Stories

2023 marks a new milestone for SmartX, as we have helped over 1,000 enterprise customers deploy over 20,000 HCI nodes worldwide. We continued to upgrade our products and solutions, with our HCI portfolio evolving into a full-stack IT infra solution with enhanced capabilities in virtualization, storage, network and security, O&M, DR, migration, and container management. Our products have been widely recognized by research institutions, including Gartner, IDC, Forrester, and GigaOm, and customers from various industries, including financial services, healthcare, and manufacturing. 

Preserving Data Integrity with Temporary Replica Strategy of SmartX HCI

Hyperconvergence software (HCI) usually leverages multiple replicas to provide redundant protection for storage data. However, the mainstream multi-replica strategy still cannot avoid the risk of data loss during the replica recovery process. To address this challenge, SmartX HCI 5.1 introduces the innovative “temporary replica” strategy. This strategy prevents the degradation of replica numbers during the replica restoration process, enhances the security of storage data, and strengthens the stability of core business services.

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SmartX builds powerful and simple-to-use computing and data infrastructures, elevating IT to focus on application and innovations that power their business.

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