Press Releases

Grenoble / Paris – France, July 12,2021 – Kalray (Euronext Growth Paris : ALKAL), a leading provider in the new generation of processors specialized in Intelligent Data Processing from Cloud to Edge, Vates, an open source software company specializing in secure and open source virtualization, and Scaleway, the leading French and European alternative IaaS and PaaS provider and Bare Metal pioneer, announce their collaboration to promote an energy-optimized and secure environment in data centers.

This first collaboration will combine Kalray’s new K200-LP™ acceleration card, incorporating Kalray’s latest generation MPPA® DPU Coolidge™ processor, with Vates’ optimized XCP-ng open source virtualization solution to create a secure, performance-optimized virtualization stack targeting data-intensive applications. This stack could be operated and managed by vendors, particularly French or European sovereign vendors in Scaleway’s ultra-high performance environmental data centers.

Virtualization environments have been a huge success for more than a decade in the data center world by allowing a large number of virtual machines to run on a single physical machine. These environments are now widely deployed both in the Cloud and in on-premise data centers. However, the hypervisor, the software part that is at the heart of these environments, must evolve to continue to be more efficient in terms of performance and energy consumption, while being more flexible and more secure.

Until now, hypervisors have only used the main processor of the machines. Faced with these new challenges, it has become necessary to revisit their traditional constitution by adding an additional processor, known as a “DPU” (Data Processor Unit), whose objective is to offload the main processor of the many increasingly demanding tasks related to communications, security or storage in order to maximize availability for the end user and reduce the energy consumption of the whole.

In this context, Kalray and Vates are developing a joint software and hardware solution to enable the open source virtualization environment XCP-ng developed by Vates and currently used by several thousand users, to offload a significant part of these operations to Kalray’s processors, leveraging the performance and low power consumption of Kalray’s processors in order to provide a much more efficient overall solution to end customers.

“Optimizing data center software environments, whether virtualized or containerized, is an extremely interesting use case for our intelligent processors and is a huge market down the road. We are very pleased to be working with Vates, which is one of the world’s experts in this field, and with Scaleway, whose one of the main objectives has always been to provide its customers with more energy-efficient and secure data centers,” said Eric Baissus, CEO of Kalray.

“Support for acceleration processors is a necessary evolution of the hypervisor industry to support ever-increasing performance and security requirements,” added Olivier Lambert, President and Founder of Vates. “We are very proud to be working with Kalray and Scaleway and to be among the first companies in the virtualization world to be able to provide this type of solution to our customers.”

For Nicolas Fontés, SVP Data center Colocation de Scaleway : “Kalray’s DPU offering combined with Vates’ virtualization technology is a perfect scenario within our energy efficient data centers for data intensive workloads and HPC use cases that require the full stack operated and managed by European/French vendors. Scaleway is also exploring DPU use cases for integration into its cloud solutions.”

Commercial availability of the XCP-ng virtualization offering powered by Kalray processors is expected in the second half of the year.

ABOUT VATES Vates is an open source software company specializing in infrastructure management and turnkey virtualization solutions and and develops innovative and secure solutions for hybrid cloud and datacenter needs such as end-ofnetwork and on-premise infrastructures. Xen Orchestra, its virtual environment orchestration, backup and infrastructure management software, is the leading solution in the Xen ecosystem and can be used both in multiple datacenters and in hybrid configurations. XCP-ng is the hypervisor developed by Vates based on Xen. XCP-ng is a secure, high-performance hypervisor with growing adoption and significant investment. It is used in a wide variety of scenarios, from data centers to edge environments to cyber use cases. www.vates.com

ABOUT SCALEWAY Scaleway is the leading alternative European infrastructure and Platform as a Service provider. It caters to the global market with the essential mix of cloud computing resources that is flexible, cost effective, reliable, secure and sustainably powered. Scaleway is the only triple play cloud provider to offer datacenter colocation (Scaleway Datacenter), dedicated servers (Dedibox) for maximum control and impact, and a modern public cloud ecosystem (Elements), compatible with S3 or Terraform, and orchestrable via Kubernetes. Scaleway’s offering is based on nearly 20 years of expertise in the development and marketing of dedicated servers and the management of innovative highend datacenters. Scaleway enjoys a growing international reputation and has business customers in over 160 countries. Scaleway has four datacenters located in France, a datacenter located in the Netherlands and has just opened a new region in Poland with a datacenter in Warsaw. Leboncoin, Ventes-privées, Safran and Le Monde have already placed their trust in Scaleway. www.scaleway.com

ABOUT KALRAY Kalray (Euronext Growth Paris -FR0010722819 -ALKAL) is a fabless semiconductor company, leading provider in a new generation of processors specialized in Intelligent Data Processing from Cloud to Edge. Kalray MPPA® Intelligent Processors are able to capture and analyze on the fly massive data flows, and interact in real time with the outside world. These processors are capable of running demanding AI algorithms and simultaneously a wide set of different processing and control tasks such as intensive mathematical algorithms, signal processing, network or storage software stacks. Kalray’s Intelligent Processors can be deployed in fast-growing sectors from Cloud to Edge: modern data centers, 5G telecom networks, autonomous vehicles, healthcare equipment, industry 4.0, drones and robots… Kalray’s offering includes processors, acceleration cards and a software suite, for a broad spectrum of customers such as next generation data center equipment manufacturers and service providers, system integrators and consumer product manufacturers such as car makers. Founded in 2008 as a spin-off of CEA French lab, Kalray counts among its investors: Alliance Venture (Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi), Safran, NXP Semiconductors, CEA and Bpifrance. Read more at: www.kalrayinc.com