Dot Hill Systems has announced they are collaborating with Intel and Mellanox on a new scale-out high performance Lustre file serving solution. The solution provides a massively scalable and high performance infrastructure for a broad range of use in high performance computing.
Dot Hill Systems has announced they are collaborating with Intel and Mellanox on a new scale-out high performance Lustre file serving solution. The solution provides a massively scalable and high performance infrastructure for a broad range of use in high performance computing.
The solution is scalable to hundreds of petabytes, across multiple arrays and servers, can have a throughput of over a terabyte per second, and is built specifically to address the distinctive signature of HPC workloads. The solution is ideal for industries such as meteorology, simulation, oil & gas, life science, rich media, and finance.
The base of the solution is the Dot Hill arrays: the Ultra48 AssuredSAN 4004 and the Ultra56 AssuredSAN 4004. The two arrays function to preserve and manage access to both the meta and the primary data. The Ultra48 is ideal for metadata operations with its high performance and small form factor. And the Ultra56 is ideal for Lustre’s OST data as it can support up to 1.3PB of capacity. Intel provides the software and namespace component. Intel’s Enterprise Edition for Lustre provides the high performance distributed file system, which supports bandwidth, performance, and scaling above and beyond traditional storage technology. The software provides a rich set of management tools and a unified namespace, eliminating the need to micromanage storage pools. Mellanox covers the networking side of the solution with Infiniband high-speed networking components and infrastructure support. Data rates are enhanced up to 100Gbps (the fastest throughput and lowest latency interconnect available), and Mellanox network solutions utilize remote direct memory access protocols making ultra-efficient use of computing resources (CPU efficiencies up by 96% and latency reduced by 90%).
Solution benefits include:
- Availability – Redundant Fail-over components provide high availability of storage subsystem.
- Protection – Enterprise class components and drives, along with RAID technology protect valuable data sets
- Scalability – Add Storage Modules as needed to expand to petabytes of usable capacity.
- Performance – Individual Storage Modules offer 6 GB/s throughput, scaled linearly with added modules. InfiniBand network paths can deliver up to 56Gbps throughput to each compute node.
- Neutrality – Avoid vendor lock-in by deploying Open Source solutions.
- Manageability – The Intel Enterprise Edition for Lustre software includes a rich set of management tools.
- Namespace – The unified namespace offered by Lustre eliminates the need to micromanage storage pools.
- Capacity – Each individual Storage Module can be configured with as much as 576 TB of raw capacity. Scale-out the solution with multiple Storage Modules to obtain petabytes of usable capacity.
