Home Enterprise DataDirect Networks Make A Series Of Announcements At SC14

DataDirect Networks Make A Series Of Announcements At SC14

by Adam Armstrong

DataDirect Networks (DDN) has made a series of announcements this year at SC14. These announcements include a collaboration with Intel, combining Intel’s Enterprise Edition for Lustre software with DDN’s EXAScaler solution. The validation of DDN’s Infinite Memory Engine burst buffer and application accelerator through continued customer adoption and the release of the latest performance tests. And the results of TechValidate’s HPC trends survey that highlights customers’ concerns with HPC/Big Data solutions and why DDN is best fit to address these concerns. 


​DataDirect Networks (DDN) has made a series of announcements this year at SC14. These announcements include a collaboration with Intel, combining Intel’s Enterprise Edition for Lustre software with DDN’s EXAScaler solution. The validation of DDN’s Infinite Memory Engine burst buffer and application accelerator through continued customer adoption and the release of the latest performance tests. And the results of TechValidate’s HPC trends survey that highlights customers’ concerns with HPC/Big Data solutions and why DDN is best fit to address these concerns. 

DDN and Intel collaborate taking a massive step forward in Lustre solution leadership. The latest generation of DDN's high-performance Lustre solution, EXAScaler, now has full support of Intel and is powered by Intel's Enterprise Edition for Lustre software. The new EXAScaler is aimed at both academic and scientific research organizations, as well as enterprises that are scaling at HPC levels.

The new EXAScaler provides users with mixed I/O performance and concurrent client access of a parallel file system in combination with high performance storage, to meet large-scale storage and analytics needs of enterprise and HPC environments today. The EXAScaler integrates file system and storage media into one extremely high performance file storage appliance providing massive throughput and highly parallel access. Not only does the new EXAScaler accelerate file systems at a low total cost of ownership, the appliance is easily managed through the DirectMon Management GUI.

Key features include:

  • 4.8PB of usable storage
  • 100MB/s sustained scalable per-drive performance
  • Up to 40GB/sec sustained throughput
  • Up to 1.5 million IOPS
  • Capable of exceeding 100,000 files creates per second (the world’s highest sustained Lustre metadata performance)
  • Seamless integration and interoperability with DDN’s SFA12KX and SFA7700X high-performance storage solutions
  • Built on DDN's Storage Fusion Architecture
  • Fully parallel I/O throughput across thousands of clients, servers, and storage devices
  • Integrated with Apache Hadoop

DDN announces broad industry validation of its Infinite Memory Engine (IME) burst buffer and application acceleration technology through broad customer adoption and the latest performance testing. IME is the world’s first, application-aware, non-volatile memory enabled acceleration engine and buffer cache and is ideal for a broad range of HPC applications. IME is a major step forward for DDN's software defined storage strategy and shows DDN's focus on designing state-of-the-art HPC and Big Data solutions.

IME allows I/O and application performances to be increased while lowering the total cost of storage. Users can see up to 70% increase in operational efficiency and cost savings by separating the provisioning of peak and sustained performance requirements instead of utilizing exclusively disk-based parallel file systems. IME enables acceleration across a wide array of HPC applications and workloads such as: shielding parallel file systems from fragmented I/O in cache, allowing users to run jobs at near line rate resulting in faster time to insight. IME also offers greater flexibility due to its non-vendor-captive-software-based approach.

The HPC trends survey, conducted by TechValidate, shows why users would look to DDN for solutions to their Big Data problems. According to two thirds of those polled, the biggest challenge in HPC storage architects is addressing the mixed I/O demands on the storage infrastructure of local HPC environments. Three quarters of those polled believe that burst buffers are the technology that is most likely to push storage to the next level. Of those polled, three quarters also believe the biggest impediments to multi-site HPC collaborations are security and data sharing complexity. With DDN's continued focus on I/O performance, continent distribution, and collaboration demands of the HPC industry, customers will continue to turn to DDN for solutions such as the EXAScaler and IME listed above.

Availability

The latest edition of DDN's EXAScaler is now available. IME is available in limited release now.

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