SGI DMF for Lustre

Silicon Graphics International Corp. announced the availability of highly scalable tiered data management capabilities that expand the functional capabilities of Intel Enterprise Edition for Lustre software and enable increased storage efficiency for organizations’ parallel computing needs.

With HPC and big data analytics growing, Intel and SGI are working together to leverage targeted software and hardware solutions to drive the industry forward. Building on Intel’s previous collaborations with the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) around the integration of the Robinhood Policy Engine, the Intel Enterprise Edition for Lustre integration with SGI DMF for Lustre now delivers a complete HSM solution, allowing multi-tiered storage to be integrated with Lustre.

SGI DMF

When paired with secondary storage such as disk or tape backup, HSM enables Lustre to provide near-limitless capacity. SGI DMF directly leverages the HSM capability by providing direct integration with Lustre, and by allowing customers to take advantage of long-term storage while simplifying management activities.

“For organizations of all sizes, ensuring efficient and rapid access to data is of paramount importance. Unfortunately, costs associated with this access often proves to be an inhibiting factor in implementing ‘always-on’ storage solutions,” said Jorge Titinger, president and CEO, SGI. “With SGI DMF for Lustre, enterprises can ensure constant access to data while leveraging the significant cost benefits and scalability of tiered storage.”

SGI DMF for Lustre is an integrated solution that adds enormous storage scalability and increased cost management to the Lustre file system environment with no impact to native Lustre file system performance. The platform is based on the most recent releases of Lustre, including the Intel Enterprise Edition for Lustre software, that feature core file system enhancements for the integration of advanced data management capabilities such as those delivered by SGI DMF for Lustre. Further, the software is supported by SGI’s global support team in conjunction with Intel’s Lustre engineering team to assist organizations to maximize the performance and scalability offered through the partnership.

Building on SGI’s strength in tiered data management solutions and Intel’s enablement of Luster-based HSM, DMF for Lustre allows organizations to expand their use of Lustre file systems to include long-term storage, in addition to being the file system of choice for high performance data access within cluster compute environments. With SGI DMF, active data is always available on the fastest tier of Lustre storage (OST) while tunable policies allow the SGI solution to migrate data to and from additional tiers of storage that can include lower cost disk, public and private cloud and robotic tape libraries. The result is a system where all data is always online and accessible, while maintaining minimized storage costs.

SGI’s DMF integrated solution includes:

• Support for storage tiers including SAN arrays and NAS from a range of open systems suppliers as well as object-based cloud storage with the Amazon S3 and other HTTP-based storage interfaces.
• Integration capabilities with an array of library-based tape devices that optimizes price per terabyte levels for less active ‘dark data’ while also maintaining the data in a ready-for-access state.

“HSM has been a highly desirable feature missing from Lustre that we helped the CEA complete,” said Brent Gorda, GM, Intel’s HPDD team. “Working with SGI to enable DMF opens a total solution to a community interested in performnce data access with tiering to cheape, higher capacity systems.”

The SGI DMF for Lustre is available.