Products In Depth

Network I/O Virtualization in SmartX HCI: Virtual NIC, PCI Pass-through and SR-IOV Pass-through

To facilitate users in leveraging network virtualization, SmartX has introduced PCI NIC pass-through capability in SMTX OS 5.1. This feature, combined with the existing SR-IOV pass-through and virtual NIC capabilities supported in previous versions, enables SMTX OS 5.1 to comprehensively support ELF (SmartX native hypervisor) users in harnessing the benefits of network I/O virtualization. Users can select the most suitable options based on their requirements for network performance, network isolation, and cost efficiency in various use cases, including futures trading, HPC, and more.
Company News

SmartX 2023 Q3 Recap – Recognitions, Products, and Case Studies

In Q3 2023, SmartX achieved a significant milestone by introducing our upgraded HCI portfolio, SmartX HCI 5.1. We have also received recognition from Gartner and IDC for our Chinese HCI SW Certified System market share and APAC customers’ choices. Moreover, we are actively collaborating with customers in various industries, including Finance, Healthcare, and Manufacturing, to explore HCI scenarios and cater to their specific needs.
Products In Depth

GPU Passthrough & vGPU: Using GPU Application in Virtualization with SMTX OS 5.1

To maximize GPU utilization, many enterprises choose to virtualize GPUs or use them in virtualization (including HCI). But how can we fully leverage GPU’s capabilities on virtualized IT infrastructure? And how can we provide stable, high-performance storage as well as compute resources for various GPU applications with an integrated IT infrastructure? To help users address these challenges, SmartX has introduced GPU passthrough and vGPU features in the upgraded HCI software SMTX OS 5.1.
Products In Depth

Eliminate Virtual Network Blind Spots with SmartX Network Visualization

As cloud computing has advanced, technologies like network virtualization have made it easier for administrators to centrally manage networks. However, this has also led to increased complexity in network traffic within the cloud. Traditional methods and tools for diagnosing data traffic face challenges when it comes to visualizing and analyzing "east-west traffic" on virtual networks. This creates network blind spots and further complicates issue locating. 
Company News

SmartX x Alauda: Jointly Launch Cloud-Native Solution with Full-Stack HCI and Container Platform

Recently, SmartX and Alauda, one of the leading cloud-native platform providers, jointly launched a cloud-native solution with full-stack HCI and container platform. Combining SmartX’s HCI and Kubernetes services with the Alauda Container Platform (ACP), this joint solution provides customers with one-stop services for enterprise cloud, accelerating the cloud-native transformation of enterprise IT infrastructure.
Cases and Insights

Boosting Oracle Data Warehouse Batch Processing Performance with SmartX HCI

Hyperconvergence (HCI) has gained increasing recognition among customers due to its software-defined architecture and integrated deployment. As a result, HCI’s application scenarios have gradually expanded to encompass most production services. However, questions remain as to whether HCI is capable of supporting mission-critical applications such as databases. To address this issue, in this article, we will discuss how SmartX HCI optimizes Oracle data warehouse batch processing performance with compelling test results.
Company News

SmartX Named a Representative Vendor in Gartner’s Market Guide for Server Virtualization

Gartner has recently released its “Market Guide for Server Virtualization”, highlighting the new trends in the server virtualization market. SmartX was recognized as a representative vendor due to its SMTX OS, with capabilities including enterprise features of Native Hypervisor ELF, converged deployment in both VMs and containers, support of various virtualization platforms, and end-to-end optimization in the virtualization layer.

Cases and Insights

SmartX Releases SKS 1.0, Offering One-Stop Solution to Build Production-Ready Kubernetes Clusters

SmartX today releases SKS 1.0, to help I&O teams easily deploy and manage production-ready Kubernetes clusters. This new product preloads commonly-used Kubernetes addons and integrates industry-leading SmartX hyper-converged product components (including virtualization, distributed storage, networking and security, etc.), to build a complete enterprise cloud infrastructure that can support both virtualized and containerized applications.
Products In Depth

Reuse Existing Devices with SmartX HCI: 4 Customers Achieve IT Infra Transformation at a Lower Cost

When businesses upgrade their IT infrastructure to hyperconvergence (HCI), they often hope to cut costs and improve resource utilization by repurposing existing hardware devices like servers. However, this can be challenging in practice as the selected HCI product may not be compatible with the existing hardware or may only be available in a packaged hardware form. Another challenge is managing both legacy and new hardware devices in a unified manner.
Cases and Insights

Caida Securities: Transforms IT Infra to Meet Service Agility and Stability Demands with SmartX HCI [Interview]

As a leading securities company in China, Caida Securities has always insisted on empowering its business with innovative technologies. Notably, in recent years, Caida Securities has maintained its position at the forefront of digital transformation by transforming its IT infrastructure with SmartX HCI, catering to the ever-evolving demands of business agility and stability. In this interview, Jingmin Xie, CIO of Caida Securities, sheds light on the remarkable progress achieved by the company in IT modernization.
Cases and Insights

Three Manufacturing Customers Share Their Insights on SmartX HCI Disaster Recovery Solutions

Key systems such as ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning System) and MES (Manufacturing Execution System) are critical to modern manufacturing enterprises as they have direct impacts on production, manufacturing, warehousing, and other core businesses. To ensure the continuity of core businesses, many enterprises implement disaster recovery (DR) to achieve zero RPO and minute-level RTO.
Products In Depth

Exploring the Architecture of ZBS – How NVMe-oF Boosts Storage Performance

In the article “Exploring the Architecture of ZBS – SmartX Distributed Block Storage”, we explained the communication between the Access (data access component) and the Meta (management component) in ZBS when I/O occurs. This is the latter part of the I/O path.
In this article, we will focus on the former part, i.e., the access protocol layer for communication between the computation side and ZBS. We will first evaluate different access protocols and explain the design and implementation of NVMe-oF in ZBS, and then provide test data of ZBS performance based on different access protocols.
Cases and Insights

Baosight: IT Infra Upgrade Driven by SmartX HCI and Distributed Storage

China Baowu (Baosight’s controlling company) uses SmartX HCI to support IT systems in multiple newly built steel mills that are managed centrally by the Shanghai headquarters. The deployment of HCI clusters completed within a week. Each factory has deployed 4 to 6 nodes to support core production service systems including ERP and MES. The group also gradually replaced their SAN storage with SmartX distributed storage ZBS to support general and critical applications.
Products In Depth

Three Performance Comparisons Disclose Why You Should Choose SmartX HCI as a VMware Alternative

Users of VMware vSAN may experience issues such as high latency, cache breakdown, and performance degradation. While many factors can contribute to these problems, the design of storage architecture (e.g., I/O path and cache) plays a critical role. If you are troubled in the same way and seeking to upgrade your legacy IT infrastructure, here are some articles that can help you understand how vSAN works and how SmartX, with modernized HCI, can improve cluster performance and make IT simple.
Cases and Insights

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.
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.

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

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.
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.

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.
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. 
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.
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 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

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”.
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.

About SmartX

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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