DDN: Data-Centric Computing Era With Innovations for Performance and Reliability at Scale

DataDirect Networks, Inc. (DDN) announced a series of performance and reliability innovations across its storage appliances, aimed at meeting the growing demand for storage performance, simplicity and reliability at scale in a new era of data-centric computing.

Infinite Memory Engine (IME) and Storage Fusion Architecture (SFA) product lines feature new data protection and performance improvements that allow customers to deploy a suite of storage services across even the most demanding emerging IoT, deep learning and technical HPC environments.

The center of gravity in the HPC and technical computing data center has shifted to data. A new generation of storage solutions is needed to deal with new application requirements while taking advantage of new storage media and increased media capacities. DDN’s advances in flash-native caching and advanced data protection across block, file and object storage combine with enterprise support for parallel file systems to give users the performance, capacity and control they need to meet these new application requirements.

Infinite Memory Engine (IME) – Extreme scale and performance in small footprint
IME flash-native data cache uniquely leverages NVMe to accelerate the performance of data-intensive application workflows. When combined with a parallel file system, like the company’s EXAScaler, IME’s release delivers performance in the smallest possible footprint.

Customers benefit from:

• One-tenth the power consumption and one-tenth to one-three hundredth the space of disk-based parallel file systems with the same peak performance

• Lower cost per peak throughput

• Flash-enabled transactional performance scaling to tens of millions of IO/s

• Ability to scale performance and capacity independently

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This magnitude of performance and efficiency in a small footprint enables simple system designs at performance levels that were simply not possible with drive-based systems. IME accelerates any application that is bottlenecked by traditional storage technologies. Because it is platform-independent and application-transparent no code modifications are needed. A solution for both data-intensive, single workflow environments and shared, multi-workflow environments, advancements in the latest release of IME make it a solution for enterprise and deep learning use cases as well as more traditional HPC workflows.

New capabilities in release of IME include:

• Choice of erasure coding options for improved data protection

• Protection against compute node failure

• Adds Ethernet to existing IB and Omni-Path support

• Improved metadata performance

• Support for the latest processor technologies (i.e. Intel Xeon Phi, Arm, and IBM Power)

• Flash optimisations for full utilisation of the latest media designs

Improved data protection choices across block, file and object storage
Starting this year, the company offers improved data protection options across its entire product lines. All firm product lines feature erasure coding or de-clustered RAID options that provide data availability, reduced rebuild time, and orders of magnitude improvements in mean-time-to-data-loss (MTDL). New innovations include an erasure coding option for the IME scale-out flash product line that eliminates read-modified-writes, the industry’s widest selection of erasure coding options for object storage with Extended Object Assure (XOA) in WOS, and a overhaul of data protection in the company’s SFA platform.

Specific customer benefits include:

• Variety of data protection choices

• Reduced rebuild rates of up to four minutes per terabyte for scale-out SSD storage (i.e. IME erasure coding)

• Lower latency random IO

• Sequential read and write performance enhancements for block-level de-cluster RAID.

Enterprise Lustre support
In addition to IME improvements and erasure coding across product lines, the company has stepped up support for its EXAScaler Enterprise Lustre distribution to include support for Lustre on ZFS and software-only EXAScaler installations. The firm already supports the largest and most diverse Lustre file system user base in the industry. Company’s expertise, feature development, tools, integrations and support make Lustre simpler to deploy, scale and manage, and more productive in both traditional HPC and high performance commercial environments. The firm is currently working with the Lustre community on significant, near-term features for performance, availability and management in its next release.

“DDN is dedicated to advancing technical computing at scale, pushing the limits of the latest technology in every possible way for the benefit of our customers,” said Robert Triendl, SVP, sales, marketing and field services. “With the advent of inexpensive flash devices and the increased focus on data in technical computing and machine learning workflows, storage architectures are undergoing a fundamental transition. The advanced features in our latest product releases constitute a significant step forward – delivering competitive advantage and reduced time to results for our customers as they transition to next generation architectures.“

IME features will be available in 3Q17.

The SFAOS version will be available in early 4Q17, and the EXAScaler Enterprise Lustre Distribution and WOS XOA are available.