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.
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.
SmartX was named an Asia/Pacific Customer’s Choice in the recently released “Voice of the Customer for Full-Stack Hyperconverged Infrastructure Software” by Gartner. This marks the third consecutive year of SmartX being named an APAC Customers’ Choice for HCI software.
One of the key challenges in replacing server hardware is ensuring the stability of mission-critical services during the hardware replacement. With SmartX HCI, O&M staff can achieve seamless replacement of HCI servers through two solutions: rebuilding the cluster on a new server, and rollingly replacing servers in the same cluster.
Today SmartX announces its ungraded hyper-converged infrastructure portfolio, SmartX HCI 5.1, which can provide unified computing, storage, network, and management support for virtualized and containerized applications in production environments.
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.
In this article, we will delve into this issue by comparing the operation of Kubernetes on virtual machines (VMs) and bare-metal servers. This will include an examination of IT architecture, as well as a comparison of Kubernetes capabilities on both platforms, covering aspects such as performance, availability, agility, security, cost, and more.
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.
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.
IDC recently published “China Software-defined Storage and Hyperconverged System Market Overview, 2023 Q1.” In contrast to its previous reports, this research additionally explores the HCI SW Certified System market segment, focusing on the “HCI SW + Certified Server” ship model. In this market segment, SmartX ranked 1st with 21.9% market share in 2023Q1.
In Q2 2023, SmartX’s HCI product and native hypervisor ELF have been included in multiple reports from Forrester, IDC and Gartner. On the other hand, our new product, SKS 1.0, can help I&O teams easily deploy and manage production-ready Kubernetes clusters. Our professionality in products and services has also received recognition from customers in finance, healthcare, and manufacturing.
One of the most prevalent problems encountered in storage systems is disk failure. Since all hard drives are consumable and subject to wear and tear, continuous usage can lead to a decline in disk performance. Hence, it is crucial to carry out frequent inspections and prevent disks from failing.
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.
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.
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.
The recent IDC Perspective report, “Hyperconverged Infrastructure Use Will Continue to Grow in Edge Environments”, has highlighted the growing use of HCI at edge sites. SmartX is featured in the report as an HCI vendor offering multiple deployment options.
Forrester has recently released its report “The Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) Landscape, Q2 2023," which evaluates 20 vendors in the market. SmartX is included in this report as one of the notable vendors, alongside other leading vendors including Nutanix, VMware, Microsoft, and Sangfor.
In this video, 8 customers from various industries, including Guotai Junan Securities, China International Capital Corporation (CICC), Caida Securities, Yingda Asset Management, The First Affiliated Hospital of Sun Yat-sen University, Xuanwu Hospital Capital Medical University, Foshan Women and Children Hospital, and Zhejiang Mingri Holding Group, share their insights on SmartX HCI services.
Allow developers to concentrate on application innovation.
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.
In Q1 2023, SmartX's HCI products have once again gained recognition from Gartner and GigaOm. Besides, our cloud-native open-source products, Virtink and knest, benefit customers with simplified Kubernetes management. We also continue to work closely with academic and industry users from financial services and manufacturing on IT infrastructure modernization.
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.
Gartner has recently released its first-ever "Market Guide for Full-Stack Hyperconverged Infrastructure Software", replacing the Magic Quadrant for Hyperconverged Infrastructure Software. SmartX, among the other 5 vendors including Nutanix, Microsoft, and VMware, is included in this market guide as a representative vendor.
Presently, ZBS uses RDMA (remote direct memory access) in two areas: the storage access network and the data synchronization network of internal storage. We have explored access protocols in the previous blog Exploring the Architecture of ZBS – How NVMe-oF Boosts Storage Performance. In this a…
Zheshang Securities Co., Ltd. (abbr. Zheshang Securities) is a Chinese listed securities company that mainly offers integrated investment and financial services. In 2020, to provide better services, Zheshang Securities decided to introduce new HCI products. As a result, it conducted a proof of concept (POC) for HCI products from SmartX, VMware, and other vendors.
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.
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.
GigaOm, a leading analyst firm, recognizes SmartX as a Fast Mover in its 2022 HCI Radar for both Enterprise and SMB deployments.
This article is a comparison of Nutanix and SmartX HCI in terms of offerings, storage architecture, and performance. While both Nutanix and SmartX HCI solutions are comprised of similar products based on similar architecture, SmartX HCI clearly outperforms Nutanix HCI in a variety of scenarios.
This article will walk you through the process of using knest to manage Kubernetes clusters step by step.
Recently, a joint research on FastMove conducted by SmartX and the Advanced Data Systems Laboratory (ADSL) at University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), with the paper titled Revitalizing the Forgotten On-Chip DMA to Expedite Data Movement in NVM-based Storage Systems, was announced as one of the accepted papers at the 21st USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST ’23).
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.
This article compares the I/O paths of VMware vSAN and SmartX HCI by analyzing read and write I/O under various scenarios and their locality probabilities to explain the effects of the I/O path on storage and cluster performance.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Today, we are excited to announce the Virtink project, an open-source and lightweight virtualization add-on for Kubernetes.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In this article we would answer these questions by explaining the differences between the hyperconverged and legacy VMware virtualization infrastructure.
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.
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.
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.
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.
SmartX Ranked 1st in China HCI SW Financial Vertical Market for 2 Consecutive Years
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
Leading Hyper-Converged Infrastructure provider SmartX announced that it has been included in Forrester’s recently released report Now Tech: Hyperconverged Infrastructure, Q2 2020.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…