AppliedMicro Announcing Mudan Storage Platform Availability

Applied Micro Circuits Corporation announced the availability of Mudan, a Ceph storage reference platform built on 64-bit ARMv8-A technology using company’s X-Gene Server on a Chip (SoC) solution at Red Hat Summit 2016.

Jointly developed by the firm and Red Hat, Inc., Mudan is an optimized Ceph storage solution to coincide with the upstream release of Ceph 10.2.1 (Jewel) and runs on RHELSA7.2.

Mudan is a fully-featured storage reference platform with a total of 14 storage disks in a 12+2 configuration with a total memory capacity of up to 128GB. The server comes in multiple form factors including 1U, 1U with hot swap and a 2U chassis, serving the needs of customers in all geographies around the world, and features low-power 2x10GbE integrated Ethernet and an IPMIv2.0 compliant management framework using an on-board baseboard management controller. Full system features include USB ports, front panel LEDs and control, rack management support, compliance and qualification, in addition to offering configurability for add-on storage adapter cards from a variety of vendors.

“Our collaboration with Red Hat to develop the Mudan platform is another proof point of the growing demand for X-Gene-based platform solutions, which provide superior storage performance while lowering the TCO,” said Kumar Sankaran, associate VP, software and platform engineering, Applied Micro. “We’re ecstatic to be able to introduce the world’s first full Ceph storage server reference design powered by Applied Micro’s ARMv8-A based X-Gene.“

Fully integrated SoCs such as company’s X-Gene help reduce system cost and complexities while offering an increased balance between compute, networking and storage resources. Ceph delivers scale-out object, block and file-level storage implemented using a completely distributed architecture to eliminate any single point of failure, and its versatility enables it to run on small devices through to high performance server systems and at relatively modest or massive scale.

“As the variety and sum total of the world’s data continues its rapid growth, so does the demand for solutions necessary to capture, store, analyze and communicate that data effectively,” said Jeff Underhill, director, server programs, ARM Ltd. “The combination of the innovative ARMv8-A based Mudan platform with the recent Ceph Jewel release, delivers an efficient scale-out storage solution required to meet the challenges of cloud-driven data centers.“

“The Ceph community has always put a strong emphasis on collaboration. The efforts around Ceph on ARM, like the work with AppliedMicro, are great examples of what Open Source communities are capable of,” said Patrick McGarry, director, Ceph community, Red Hat. “Early results on X-Gene show that ARM architecture has some very compelling applications that will be exciting to watch evolve. As Ceph continues to grow I anticipate many more community efforts to support a variety of integrations and platforms.“