Fungible today announced the availability of its Storage Initiator cards, bringing the capabilities of its data processing units (DPUs) to a standard PCIe form factor.

First teased this spring, the cards feature the vendor’s S1 DPU, and serve two purposes. The first is to enable NVMe over transmission control protocol (NVMe-over-TCP) for servers and operating systems that don’t natively support the standard. The second is to offload storage input/output (I/O) operations from the CPU, allowing for improved performance and reduced processor load.

The result is a server equipped with cards that can interface with storage resources in another server, or even another rack, as if they were directly attached, eliminating the need for onboard storage, according to Fungible.

NMVe-over-TCP is key to Fungible’s composable infrastructure strategy as it doesn’t require specialized interfaces like Mellanox’s Infiniband.

“Traditionally, TCP is low performance, but with a DPU, we are getting… five-to-six times higher performance than fully customized storage platforms that are based on x86,” Benny Siman-Tov, VP of product and business development, told SDxCentral in an earlier interview.

Fungible claims its top-tier cards are capable of offloading 2.5 million I/O operations per second, freeing up approximately 30% of the CPU’s processing capacity to run other workloads.

The Storage Initiator platform is available in three varieties including Fungible’s FC200, FC100, and FC50 cards, which offer 200 Gb/s, 100 Gb/s, and 50 Gb/s of throughput respectively.

The cards enable data center operators to interface existing server resources with Fungible’s previously announced FS1600 storage node — a two-rack-unit appliance boasting 24 NVMe SSDs and a pair of embedded DPUs — and other NVMe-over-TCP-enabled storage servers.

And like the FS1600, Fungible’s Storage Initiator cards are managed by the Fungible Composer platform, which orchestrates the composition of disaggregated data center resources on demand.

Today’s announcement marks Fungible’s latest push to bring composable infrastructure to the masses.

“Our goal is to bring the performance, efficiency, and simplicity that hyperscalers have historically enjoyed to data centers of all scales, anywhere from half a rack to hundreds of racks,” Srinidhi Varadarajan, VP of solutions at Fungible, said in an earlier interview.

The company aims to breakdown traditional data center conventions where a workload runs on a specific server SKU to one where CPU, GPU, or storage resources can be pooled across multiple racks and allocated to workloads on the fly.

The company’s Storage Initiator cards are a step in this direction.

“We stand behind supporting a standards-based open ecosystem,” Fungible CEO Eric Hayes said, adding that the company’s Storage Initiator cards will help drive adoption of NVMe-over-TCP for storage applications.