Data Center Solution - Data Center Solution FPGAs are a cornerstone of modern data centers, enabling high-performance networking, accelerated storage, and secure platform management. By offloading compute-intensive tasks and enforcing hardware-level security, they deliver the efficiency, scalability, and reliability needed for next-generation AI and cloud workloads. Why Altera FPGAs Why Altera FPGAs Get Started Get Started View Details DPU & AI NIC Modern data centers are strained by exploding data growth, AI-driven workloads, and the rising cost of CPU-based storage processing. Traditional architectures struggle with NVMe‑oF protocol overhead, inline encryption/compression latency, and inconsistent tail performance. FPGA-based storage acceleration solves these bottlenecks by moving critical data services—protocol handling, data reduction, cryptography, metadata operations—into a deterministic, line‑rate hardware pipeline. This enables predictable low latency, improved throughput-per-watt, and a flexible, future-proof storage architecture that scales with modern AI, analytics, and cloud workloads. Three Key Sections of Storage Acceleration 1. Front-End Fabric Acceleration FPGA acceleration offloads storage networking functions such as NVMe‑oF (TCP/RoCE), RDMA, queue steering, checksum, and packet processing, delivering deterministic line‑rate performance and freeing host CPUs for application logic. 2. Inline Data Services & Computational Storage FPGA-based pipelines perform latency-sensitive operations—compression, encryption, hashing, erasure coding, metadata filtering, and data reduction—directly in the I/O path, reducing CPU load and improving efficiency for AI and analytics workflows. 3. Backend Storage Processing & Array Offload FPGAs accelerate backend services such as RAID, replication, journaling, block mapping, and SSD management. This enables higher sustained throughput, consistent tail latency, and scalable performance for all-flash arrays and disaggregated storage architectures. Storage View Details Storage Platform Management is required wherever a system’s hardware needs to be overseen and supervised, such as a server platform, an accelerator module, and add-in card, just to name a few. Platform management embraces everything from low-end tasks such as power-sequencing when the system is powered-on or powered-off, which may be implemented by using CPLDs or entry-level FPGAs, all the way to high-end activities such as resource discovery, telemetry, configuraiton, control, update, security, and resiliency, which may require specialized Baseboard Management Controller (BMC) devices. Altera FPGAs, such as MAX10, Agilex 3, and Agilex 5, are optimized to perform the platform management functions from Host Processor Module (HPM), SCM (Secure Control Module), and PRoT (Platform Root of Trust) to BMC. The platform management solution using Altera FPGAs provides great flexibility and scalability, faster Time-to-Market (TTM), and lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). The flexibility and scalability of the Altera FPGA-based solution provide customers with the possibility to address the evolving security standards and protocols. Faster enabling and TTM make it possible to achieve Best-in-Class security, in-field upgradability, ease of scaling up or down for various platform architectures/generations, and no legacy burden. Customers can also benefit from a lower TCO through competitive BOM, board area, and consolidated functions into one FPGA. The Intel 7 technology based Agilex FPGA also ensures better processor and supply resilience. Altera is an advocate for Open Source and OCP (Open Compute Project) as an active participant in OCP and OpenBMC. The diagram below indicates all the platform management components and their functions. The FlexBMC FPGA in the green-dash-square can be implemented on a single Agilex 5 FPGA that can perform BMC, SCM and PRoT functions, which provides a lot of benefits for customers. Platform Management View Details Platform Management View Details AI Inference Applications