NGX rolls out ExaScale block storage for AI workloads

NGX has developed its scale-out block storage technology to compete with other pure block storage products.

Privately owned NGX, founded in 2015 and based in Ankara, Turkey, builds unified block, file, and object NGX-H hybrid flash+disk arrays, NGX-AFA all-flash arrays, NGX Hyperio scale-out object, and scale-out NAS by adding pNFS to the NGX-AFA and NGX-H systems. Back in 2022, it had more than 200 systems deployed, mostly in Europe, and its technology suite included deduplication, inline compression, zero detection, thin provisioning, and more. Now it has developed the software-defined NGX ExaScale array, which we first encountered as a roadmap item at the end of 2022. It is now a product, can scale from terabytes to exabytes of capacity, and is focused on AI, analytics, and similar workloads.

CEO and chairman Beyhan Çalışkan presented the ExaScale story to an A3 TechLive audience of analysts and journalists in Paris, along with his Engineering Director, Pradeep Ganesan, who is based in Chennai, India. We understand Çalışkan founded NGX Storage in 2015 after being a senior researcher at TÜBİTAK, the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey, which looks at science, technology, and innovation. Toward the end of his TÜBİTAK tenure, Çalışkan and the NGX team presented a project to TÜBİTAK for developing a domestic unified all-flash/hybrid data storage system. Ex-NetApp tech architect Ganesan joined NGX in 2020.

The NGX ExaScale array uses NVMe internally for controller-to-drive and host communications, supporting RDMA and NVMe over TCP. It has a VAST Data-like disaggregated design, scales from 3 to 30 nodes with up to 80 PB of usable capacity, and offers high availability, three-way replication, and non-disruptive expansion, with sub-millisecond latency. ExaScale can be deployed on-premises or in the public cloud. 

Çalışkan told us the platform is production-ready, designed for global deployment, and NGX is partnering with global OEM vendors. ExaScale will be developed to handle hundreds of PB in future releases. 

ExaScale has two storage tiers. Data is ingested into a high-write-speed SSD tier, also used for storing metadata - shades of VAST Data’s design here. There is 3-way replication of both data and metadata. The new data is then deduplicated and sharded, and distributed across several nodes in the background, onto QLC capacity SSDs, for balanced workloads and optimized resource use. RDMA over NVMe is used for internal east-west traffic and the capacity layer has a RAID-6 protection scheme. 

 The system is highly available but there is no quorum node. It has user-space NVMe access and a kernel bypass architecture.

 NGX has a channel-only sales model. It competes with US vendors like Dell, EverPure, HPE, Infinidat, Lightbits Labs, NetApp, Vast Data, and others, and it may well have a price advantage over them. Its main customer base is in Turkey, where customers could well be pleased, even proud, to buy modern storage systems technologically equivalent to the main US vendors but from an indigenous Turkish company. It also sells in the Middle East and Europe, including Poland and Spain. NGX took in an initial investment when it was founded but has since grown organically.

Çalışkan told us NGX is affected by DRAM and NAND price increases but is not increasing its prices as much as its competitors.

The overwhelming majority of NGX customers in Turkey are enterprises that started out with a PB-scale system. It will position itself as a complete, multi-platform, storage ecosystem supplier covering the gamut from NVMe enterprise-level performance to archive workloads. Other AI storage suppliers, it says, focus primarily on high-performance file storage for AI workloads, with limited use-case support, more complex infrastructure and a secondary focus on the storage/data lifecycle.

If you are going to get into a technology features comparison with NGX, you better bring your best tech people along. Ganesan and his team have developed respectable scale-out technology and know what they are talking about.