DDN strengthens its HPC storage offering

DataDirect Networks has introduced new high-performance computing (HPC) storage solutions and capabilities, which it will feature at the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC17) in Denver, Colorado.

6 years ago Posted in

The new solutions include an entry-level burst buffer appliance (IME140) for cost-effective I/O acceleration, a next generation monitoring software (DDN Insight), and the company’s new declustered RAID solution (SFA Declustered RAID “DCR”) for increased data protection in massive storage pools. DDN also announced recent HPC customer wins in some of the world’s largest supercomputing centers.

“Modern HPC workflows require new levels of performance, flexibility and reliability to turn data and ideas into value,” said John Abbott, founder and research VP, 451 Research. “With its long-standing HPC storage heritage, DDN is strongly positioned with closely integrated components that can deliver extreme I/O performance, comprehensive monitoring at scale and new levels of data protection.”

New DDN Solutions and Next Generation Monitoring Tools

HPC and data-intensive enterprise environments are facing new pressures that stem from higher application diversity and sophistication along with a steep growth in volume of active datasets. These trends present a tough challenge to today’s filesystems in delivering the performance and economics to match business needs and compute capability. In addition, as rotational drive capacities grow the risk of data loss increases due to longer drive rebuild times. DDN’s latest technology innovations deliver the enhanced performance, flexibility and management simplicity needed to solve these challenges and to accelerate large-scale workflows for greater operational efficiency and ROI.

DDN IME140 - DDN has expanded its IME® product line with the new IME140 that makes IME scale-out flash accessible to more organisations at lower cost. The IME140 supports extreme file performance in a small 1U flash data appliance. Each appliance can deliver more than 11GB/s write and 20GB/s read throughputs and more than 1M file IOPs (read and write). Starting with a resilient solution as small as 4 units, the IME140 allows organisations to cost-effectively scale performance independent of amount of capacity required. Traditional parallel file systems often cannot keep pace with the mixed I/O requirements of modern workloads and fail to deliver the potential of flash. The IME software implements a faster, leaner data path which delivers to applications the low-latencies and high throughputs of NVMe. The IME140 1U building block allows organisations to intelligently apply fast flash where it is needed, while maintaining cost-effective capacity on HDD within the file system.

DDN Insight - DDN Insight is DDN’s next-generation monitoring software. Easy to deploy, DDN Insight allows customers to monitor the most challenging environments at scale, across multiple file systems and storage appliances. With DDN Insight customers can quickly identify and address hot spots, bottlenecks and misbehaving applications. Tightly integrated with SFA®, EXAScaler®, GRIDScaler® and IME, DDN Insight delivers an intuitive way for customers to comprehensively monitor their complete DDN-based ecosystem.

DDN SFA Declustered RAID (SFA DCR) - The growth of drive capacities, as exemplified by the recently released 12TB Near Line SAS drive, has exposed the limitations and inflexibility of traditional RAID configurations. Since traditional RAID pools are constrained to a small drive count, rebuild times can become long due to the limited spindles supporting the rebuild operation. This limitation exposes storage systems to long periods of performance degradation during rebuilds and higher potential data loss due to multiple simultaneous disk failures. DDN’s SFA systems have mitigated these limitations using an overprovisioned backend and highly optimised rebuild algorithms. Now DDN’s new SFA Declustered RAID (DCR) goes a step further removes the constraint of a small, fixed drive count RAID pools and allows data and parity information to be distributed among a much larger, user configurable, number of disks. Offered on DDN’s SFA14KX®, DCR improves data resilience and provides faster rebuild times, higher IOPs performance, larger virtual drives, and increased storage efficiency, among other benefits.

DDN strengthens its HPC storage offering

DataDirect Networks has introduced new high-performance computing (HPC) storage solutions and capabilities, which it will feature at the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC17) in Denver, Colorado.

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