Fortissimo Foundation is a hyper-converged storage solution that overcomes the limitations of traditional storage architectures. It integrates compute, storage, networking, and software into a single scalable appliance. The solution features a scale-out architecture with distributed storage across multiple nodes. This provides linear scalability, high performance, and fault tolerance. It also aggregates DRAM across nodes to provide ultra-fast "in memory" access to data.

1. Hyper-Converged Storage
FORTISSIMO FOUNDATION
Balancing Application Efficiency and
Performance

2. Unleashing the Modern Data
Center
Overcoming storage limitations
Exponential data growth is posing great challenges and is opening new
opportunities to many industries forcing us to deeply reevaluate how we
work with data in computer systems. Data is not a simple result of our
digital society but has to be considered a precious resource. In effect,
every human activity produces data and to exploit its huge potential we
need to be able to analyze data and respond to it in real time. The key
point becomes then the efficiency of data access. Understanding this
enables the enterprise to take advantage of this technologic trend and the
enormous economic benefits of performance data.
Unfortunately, traditional storage architectures and emerging software
only solutions are unable to provide the right architecture to efficiently
manage present and future data analytic opportunities mainly because
they lack in the necessary flexibility. Experience with data intensive
environments shows that whenever huge data volumes are required
conventional storage architectures quickly reach their limitations.
The main limitations of current storage solutions include:
■ Time-consuming management (including data and system recovery)
■ Exploding costs for high-availability, now required at multiple levels
(Disk, Node, System)
■ Major problems with (planned) downtime
■ Over or under-provisioning
■ High costs per IOPS and capacity
■ Application performance issues
■ Scale-out & scalability issues
Setting the foundation for sustainable future business, FORTISSIMO
FOUDATION introduces unique technologies and features to
standard hardware, realizing an extremely high value proposition
that has no equivalent in the market today.
FORTISSIMO FOUNDATION (FF) integrates in a single product all the
features required to satisfy present and future data requirements
including unique features like, but not limited to:
 Direct Application Acceleration
 Unique “Scale-out In Memory Storage”
 Unique “Local In Memory Boost”
 Scalable Parallel Data Access (I/O and IOPS)
In this way FF is able to solve all the problems related to traditional
storage architectures and data analysis.
These are all extremely good reasons to consider
alternative storage strategies to be able to
provide a solid foundation for your present and
future business.
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A new simple and powerful architecture

3. A3CUBE’s Fortissimo Foundation architecture enables you to easily manage data and
performance in a simple but powerful way.
This hyper-converged, unique “Hardware accelerated Software-Defined System” HSDS™ is
designed for all environments enabling high performance data access requirements and
application acceleration needs.
FORTISSIMO FOUNDATION offers extremely high scalability at high levels of performance
for any workload with an industry first “in memory scale out capability” thanks to the ultra
low latency memory to memory communication architecture called “Data Path
Accelerator” (DPA ™).
FORTISSIMO FOUNDATION intelligently combines an advanced ZFS file system across
multiple nodes overcoming the limitation of a single system. It aggregates the DRAM
across all the system nodes creating a powerful DRAM based system and provides parallel
data access without using complex and difficult tools to manage today’s parallel file
systems.
UNMATCHED FLEXIBLE SCALABILITY OF CAPACITY AND
PERFORMANCE
■ FF supports multiple configurations including unique global scale-out in memory
storage (IMS) and local in memory boost
■ No forced migration due to scalability limits
■ Extremely long lifecycle thanks to technology refreshes
■ Investment protection using a fully open hardware approach (no proprietary driver
required to support any kind of storage devices)
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Hyper-Convergence

4. FAULT TOLERANCE AND SELF-HEALING @ MULTIPLE SYSTEM LEVEL
■ No extra costs for high availability (Node Level and System Level Protection)
■ Provides high service levels
■ Zero downtime
■ Unique hardware fault back support
BASED ON OUR DISTRIBUTED ZFS FILE SYTEM ARCHITECTURE
■ No exotic file system
■ Extending the benefit of ZFS across multiple nodes
■ Transforms ZFS into a high performance parallel file system
HARDWARE ACCELERATED MUTLINODE STORAGE COMMUNICATION & AGGREGATION
■ Delivers massive storage consolidation potential within one architecture
SYSTEM PLATFORM WITH END-TO-END MAINTENANCE
■ Use of a standard file system with well proven benefits
■ Fewer evaluation, implementation and maintenance tasks
HIGH PERFORMANCE THROUGH HIGH PARALLELISM OF READ AND WRITE OPERATIONS AND
DIRECT MEMORY TO MEMORY COMMUNICATION
■ High I/O performance is achieved at a much lower cost
4
Hyper-Convergence
FORTISSIMO FOUDATION is a revolutionary converged infrastructure solution that
consolidates the compute (server) tier and the storage tier into a single, integrated
appliance, providing acceleration using A3CUBE scale out “in memory” capability
across all the servers connected with FF.
The A3CUBE solution is radically simple, extremely scalable, extremely powerful and
uniquely flexible compared to any existing solution on the market today.

5. A3CUBE has redefined storage scalability, reliability,
manageability and performance to help the enterprise
easily manage dynamic business changes.
A3CUBE combines powerful technologies together along
with sophisticated engineering to realize an unique market
wide product, starting from how modern applications
works and creating the perfect environment to extol their
full potential
Turnkey, end-to-end solution, FORTISSIMO
FOUDATION, is based on storage nodes with enterprise-
class x86 servers equipped with A3CUBE Hardware DPA
accelerator (RONNIEE express).
The system supports many different configurations
from 5 multimode fully direct connected for real-time
response in any condition up to 512 storage nodes in a
19- inch standard multiple racks to reach a capacity of
up to 10s of petabytes and application specific hybrid
configuration with very large scalability.
Data storage is distributed across the storage nodes in
the system aggregating SSDs, DRAM and HDD while
providing parallel data I/O access.
Another important feature of the system is the
revolutionary easy to use management that permits the
user to configure any storage dimension in minutes
including very complex “in memory configurations” and
application oriented tuning with no experience in
storage and cluster configuration.
FORTISSIMO FOUNDATION is equipped with an easy to
use GUI that allows even relatively inexperienced
administrators to centrally perform all management
tasks, along with monitoring and reporting and tune the
performance when required.
All components are optimized in terms of performance
and reliability.
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Turnkey, end-to-end solution

6. Distributed scale-out platform
FORTISSIMO FOUDATION architecture is completely different from conventional storage
system architectures.
The scalability of capacity and performance is achieved through the storage nodes, which
are configured with cost-efficient, performance-optimized industry-standard servers and
storage subsystems and are equipped with a revolutionary data path accelerator that
offload the OS from all the communication tasks.
The system offers a large number of these storage nodes and manages them as a single
storage pool. In addition, data is evenly distributed across all the storage nodes, where it is
stored and written redundantly.
DRAM can be aggregated across all the nodes and used as DRAM-based SSD 1000x faster
than any existing disk. Direct memory access across different nodes permits the
architecture to extol the true performance of memory caching algorithms providing very
high level file system performance.
This scale-out approach has many advantages:
■ Linear scalability: the performance of the system is scaled linearly by adding new nodes
■ High performance: the distributed storage of data across several hard disks and storage
nodes enables very high-performance of the system
■ The “In memory” scale-out capability enables unmatched ultra fast data access to any
application
■ Fault tolerance: the entire system is resilient due to the storage of data replicas, thus
ensuring protection against hard disk and storage node faults or outages
I/O
I/O
I/O
I/O
I/O
“In memory” Scale-out architecture
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7. HSDS ™ Hardware Accelerated Software-Defined Storage
FORTISSIMO FOUDATION features a ZFS open source storage file system, one of the leading
software technologies for modern storage. FF permits ZFS to be used in parallel across multiple
nodes overcoming the limitation of the single node capability of standard ZFS implementation and
scaling the well known benefits and performance of ZFS
FORTISSIMO FOUDATION uses software-defined, hardware accelerated mechanisms to aggregate all
the resources of the storage nodes and provide parallel concurrent access to data in an unique way,
transforming a standard ZFS file system into a high performance parallel file system (“In memory”)
Single File System (ZFS)
Applications
Storage Nodes
“In memory” scale-out architecture7

8. Intelligently optimized building blocks
The Fortissimo Foundation hardware architecture is the basis for high availability and the massive scalability of capacity and performance.
For that reason, the entire hardware infrastructure features extremely powerful building blocks across the board. For each storage node,
including all data copies, the system delivers data throughput at a rate of 1.5 or 2.9 GB/s. The storage nodes are integrated in a redundant
internal network. The nodes are interconnected through an ultra fast and evolutionary “in Memory Network” based on a novel PCIe
network on the back-end that guaranties unmatched ultra-low latency and scalable bandwidth. On the front-end a 10 Gb Ethernet network
ensures constant performance
The architecture is Extremely Simple, Extremely Scalable,
Extremely Flexible and Extremely Powerful. Thanks to optimized
building blocks FORTISSIMO FOUDATION is able to deliver
unique capabilities that offer perfect tuning of your applications
and the use of the latest SSDs technologies.
Multiple configurations are supported to reach a capacity of
many petabytes.
■ The Integrated Management Node keeps a record of events
during system operation and it is used for managing the
infrastructure solution. No single failure can impact the
operation of the system.
■ Different type of nodes can be used to realize the optimal
configuration that fits your environment.
■ The true parallel scale-out architecture of FORTISSIMO
FOUDATION, with numerous storage nodes and distributed data
storage, is extended not only to Disks but also the DRAM
memory.
It provides a fault-tolerant architecture with complete
redundancy of hardware, software and data.
RONNIEE Data
Plane
CPUs
X86 64 bit CPU with
PCIe Gen3
Memory:
Perfect balanced
memory for data and
computation
Disks:
SSDs
and Hybrids
DC or Client I/O
fabric
Network Card (10-40
Gbit/ETH, IB)
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Extremely Simple, Scalable, Flexible

9. Incredibly easy central management
with comprehensive support
FORTISSIMO FOUNDATION’s comprehensive platform
administration via web GUI is the easiest enterprise level system to
manage. The integrated GUI is used to manage the entire system,
including the ZFS file system , with no command lines or
management expertise needed.
The management tool is the central entity for software
deployment as well as for tasks like network and cluster
management. In addition, enhanced functions have been
integrated to make configuration and other tasks trivial.
Key advantages:
■ Easy, time-saving management even for inexperienced
administrators
■ Reduced costs for administration and maintenance
■ Configuration of the entire system in minutes (including
memory aggregation and advanced features organization)
■ Visual management of the entire system
■ Tuning of the performance with unique graphical intuitive tools
Thanks to its innovative scale-out architecture, FORTISSIMO FOUNDATION is
the ideal solution for all applications that demand effective performance in
response to exploding data growth
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10. Use Cases Requirement Benefits
■ Zero downtime, high quality of service, multi-level HA
■ Maintenance and component replacement without
interrupting operations
■ Linear scalability on demand
■ No application migration costs
■ Consistent high performance, even for large numbers of
users
■ Multi-level in memory architecture
■ Scale out native DRAM in memory disk support
■ Multi-level tiering for unmatchable price performance
■ Unique parallel scale out ZFS file system implementation
(Uniquely transforms standard ZFS in a high performance
distribute parallel file system!)
■ Integration with databases and computational framework for
new levels of converged application performance
■ Reduced costs of setup, integration and management
■ Specific Database Hardware acceleration
■ MySQL Acceleration starting from single node (converged)
■ Cassandra Acceleration starting from single node (converged)
■ High I/O performance for video and audio streaming
■ High-performance data access
■ Scalable bandwidth and IOPS
Leverage business goals and predictive
analytics to realize real-time context
and maximize the value of every
customer interaction
Minimize overhead and IT costs
incurred from business change with
rich user applications to manage,
monitor, and refine decisions
High-volume, high-speed front-line
decisions that must be made in real-
time with big data and analytics that
are actionable and operational
Offering storage and converged
commuting capacity with high
flexibility, availability, performance
and efficiency
Accelerate applications “in memory”
providing unique hardware data path
acceleration
Intensive Data Analysis
Databases
Media & Entertainment
Extensive research and
development projects
Predictive simulations where access to more
memory allows more sophisticated models to
be used and larger problems to be solved.
Complex database query searching,
particularly in applications where the results or
findings are used to direct the next step in a
process. Security Inspection at many levels.
Real-time analytics, such as fraud detection
and compliance enforcement or the
personalization of an online experience during
a customer’s site visit, based on patterns
found in very large datasets
Hyper-Converged Storage System
FORTISSIMO FOUNDATION
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High I/O performance for video and
audio streaming