In response to customer demand, Excelero and ThinkParQ already have deployed NVMe storage clusters with BeeGFS and NVMesh to increase productivity of advanced GPU compute clusters. These organisations experienced the storage bottleneck issue endemic to AI – that I/O intensive applications cannot be processed fast enough even on GPU-based systems. As a result, IT teams often copy datasets in and out locally, which is an inefficient and time-consuming process.
“With Excelero’s NVMesh, our customers have access to an ultra-low latency, high performance approach to scale-out storage” said Frank Herold, CEO of ThinkParQ. “We’ve been impressed with NVMesh’s ability to deliver the high IOPS and ultra-low latency of NVMe drives over the network with highly available volumes – as well as options for distributed erasure coding and BeeGFS' unmatched ability to efficiently handle all kinds of access patterns and file sizes.”
To demonstrate the possibilities of this new scale-out infrastructure, the companies used the industry standard mdtest and IOR benchmarks. The test system was a compact 2U 4-server chassis with a total of 24 NVMe drives, connected via a 100Gbit RDMA network to 8 BeeGFS client compute nodes. Tests were run on the exact same hardware configuration with BeeGFS utilising the direct-attached NVMe vs. BeeGFS utilising NVMesh logical volumes. Taking advantage of NVMesh to offload mirroring operations, BeeGFS file create operations were boosted 3x, while metadata read operations were boosted 2.5x. For small random file access, which is often considered to be especially critical for application efficiency, NVMesh’s low latency technology boosted BeeGFS 4K write IOPS to 1.25 million per second, a 2.5x improvement. By leveraging NVMesh distributed erasure coding for BeeGFS, customers can get up to 90% usable capacity while still tolerating drive failures. All the while, achieving 75GB/s streaming throughput from this entry-level system.
Through June 30 Excelero is offering enhanced pricing on combined purchases of NVMesh and BeeGFS. More details are available from both companies.
“You can’t build tomorrow’s enterprise on yesterday’s infrastructure,” said Lior Gal, CEO and co-founder of Excelero. “We’re delighted at how smoothly NVMesh and BeeGFS work together, and the way we enable organisations to work without compromise to either IT teams or end users. We look forward to working further with ThinkParQ so that more organisations worldwide can maximise their NVMe ROI and the efficiency of their entire operations.”