Supermicro's New NVIDIA DPU-Based "Just a Bunch of Flash" Storage Targets AI and HPC Workloads

This IDC Market Note discusses the recent announcement by Supermicro of a new petabyte-scale NVIDIA DPU-based just a bunch of flash (JBOF) storage device at the 2024 Open Compute Project (OCP) Global Summit in San Jose, California. The theme of this year's OCP Summit, "From Ideas to Impact," aimed to reflect OCP's commitment to fostering innovation that transcends theoretical discussions and manifests into real-world solutions. The new Supermicro JBOF with NVIDIA BlueField-3 is a noteworthy alternative to traditional flash storage expansion devices with its use of DPUs for power efficiency. The system uses up to four NVIDIA BlueField-3 DPUs, each featuring 400Gb Ethernet or InfiniBand networking, and runs the storage application on the DPU's 16 Arm cores to facilitate hardware acceleration for encryption, compression, erasure coding, and other high-computation storage and networking capabilities, as well as AI storage expansion. Supermicro and NVIDIA are working to establish an ecosystem to drive adoption and enable storage infrastructure software to run natively on the NVIDIA BlueField-3 DPU in the Supermicro JBOF.