Fresh off finalizing its merger between Dell and EMC, Dell EMC announced today its first combination of technology, a rack-scale flash solution that combines the EMC DSSD D5 and Dell PowerEdge R730 servers. This new solution, called the Dell EMC DSSD D5 Rack-Scale Flash solution, is ideal for SAS analytics infrastructure. Both companies state that SAS 9 analytics can now deliver “game-changing” performance and the solution enables SAS customers to take full advantage of the SAS portfolio.
Fresh off finalizing its merger between Dell and EMC, Dell EMC announced today its first combination of technology, a rack-scale flash solution that combines the EMC DSSD D5 and Dell PowerEdge R730 servers. This new solution, called the Dell EMC DSSD D5 Rack-Scale Flash solution, is ideal for SAS analytics infrastructure. Both companies state that SAS 9 analytics can now deliver “game-changing” performance and the solution enables SAS customers to take full advantage of the SAS portfolio.
There is a lot of buzz about Big Data, and rightly so. With everything from social media to smart devices like cars, appliances, and even watches generating data, companies need to do two things, store this data and analyze it. The storage aspect presents a set of challenges due to the high volume of data, but that same high volume and constant creation of new data presents several challenges to companies, such as SAS, that set out to analyze and help their customers analyze this data. Analytics are becoming more sophisticated and more users want to be able to make real-time decisions based off of these analyses. Companies need powerful technology to help them analyze data.
Earlier this year EMC introduced the DSSD D5, all-flash storage that takes full advantage of NVMe while attempting to side step the drawbacks of the technology. The tremendous boost in performance that the DSSD D5 can provide is ideal for customer using SAS applications (SAS, previously short for statistical analysis system, is an analytics company, not to be confused with the common SAS interface). SAS customers can used the DSSD D5 to avoid bandwidth and I/O bottlenecks or leverage the new Dell EMC solution to build their own high-performance analytics cluster for new projects.
Dell EMC combined their powerful PowerEdge R730 server with the DSSD D5 to enable SAS customers to be able to access their data faster and support near- or real-time decision-making. Dell EMC and SAS state that their customers will be able to leverage analytics at scale and accelerate time-to-value for their SAS workloads while lowering risk, delivering higher performance, reliability, and flexibility. On the performance side, Principled Technologies performed a test using the DSSD D5 to show very low latency while meeting the bandwidth requirements of hundreds of cores (tested with 352 cores). Through their testing, Principled Technologies were able to demonstrate near-linear scaling with eight Dell R730 servers, powered by Intel Xeon processors E5-2699 v4, and running more than 800 and concurrent analytics jobs. The Dell EMC DSSD D5 was able to deliver a peak bandwidth of 22.8GB/s while keeping CPU/real-time ratios greater than 1.0 (anything over 1 means the CPU isn’t waiting). Even using 8 R730s, the DSSD D5 kept up with CPU demand for I/O.
Benefits include:
- Accelerate high-performance, analytic-intensive workloads that require large working data sets and/or predictable, ultra-low response times
- Increase analytic accuracy with higher frequency analysis on more granular data
- Enable more business users to make analytic-driven decisions
- Consolidate SAS silos to deliver a single analytics solution for all user roles
- Get full utilization of existing CPU investment and expand the types and sources of data to deliver more robust analysis
Along with the Dell EMC DSSD D5 Rack-Scale Flash solution, the company is also announcing factory-installed DSSD client cards packaged in select Dell PowerEdge Servers offered as a drop-in-the-box shipment. These client cards are expected to be installed in select PowerEdge servers later this year.
Availability
SAS analytics solution is available now. The new factory-installed DSSD cards are expected to be available later this year.
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