Liqid’s software-defined composable infrastructure platform now ships with Open Compute Project (OCP) compliant data center hardware from Inspur as well as Western Digital storage.

The Western Digital partnership uses Liqid’s software to compose graphics processing units (GPUs) and high-speed, low-latency non-volatile memory express (NVMe) storage over Ethernet fabric. It also uses Western Digital’s open API and its OpenFlex hardware.

The OpenFlex storage platform provides very high density, high performance storage for the data center, “but the one thing it's missing is software to make that box composable, to take the storage inside that box and slice and dice it to create a big pool of storage,” said Liqid CEO and co-founder Sumit Puri. “That’s where our partnership comes in.” The software allows IT users to aggregate and share large pools of data center resources over distance as well as more granular resource management and automation at the stack level, Puri said.

Liqid’s software integrates with OpenFlex hardware, and in addition to providing storage management and composability, it also performs chassis management such as powering the systems and doing resets.

The composable infrastructure vendor started talking about its Western Digital partnership back in November, and now, “we’re telling the world that the software is available to use,” Puri added.

Additionally, Liqid expanded its Inspur partnership, which now allows composability across high-speed PCI Express (PCIe). The OCP-compliant Inspur GPU Composable Infrastructure Rack includes Nvidia GPUs and enables composability of GPUs via PCIe fabric-based, composable infrastructure from Liqid. The platform also integrates with composable NVMe, FPGA, Intel Optane memory technology, and other disaggregated data center resources.

This Inspur partnership shows Liqid is hardware agnostic and fabric agnostic, Puri said. PCIe interconnects tend to cost less, use less power, and provide a type of “easy button” for the data center, he said. Meanwhile, for customers whose only concern is low-latency and high-performance, regardless of cost, Ethernet remains the preferred interconnect. “If you want PCIe, the fabric just works, and if you want Ethernet the fabric just works.”