Dell EMC Combined DSSD and PowerEdge Servers for SAS Analytics

Highlights:

• Dell EMC DSSD D5 Rack-Scale Flash solution leverages Dell EMC PowerEdge R730 servers powered by Xeon processors, delivers faster, more scalable SAS 9 analytics.

• Near-linear scaling, with increasing performance, allows customers to scale their IT environments by simply adding and fully utilizing compute resources.

• Scales SAS analytics to at least 3X the concurrent users, applications and analytics supported by leading all flash arrays.

• Dell EMC to offer DSSD client cards factory installed in select PowerEdge servers

 Dell EMC, a part of Dell Technologies, announced the DSSD D5 rack-scale flash solution leveraging PowerEdge R730 servers.

DSSD D5 rack-scale flash solution

This solution for SAS applications delivers game-changing performance for SAS 9 analytics, enabling customers to take advantage of new innovative offerings from the SAS portfolio.

Customers can leverage DSSD D5 solutions for storage performance to get more value from their existing SAS investments by complementing existing infrastructure to address bandwidth and I/O bottlenecks. Alternatively, they can leverage the company’s solution to build a high-performance analytics cluster for new projects.

The next generation analytics solution for users across all roles will enable customers to leverage analytics at scale and accelerate time-to-value for their SAS workloads. The firm’s storage and server configuration lowers risk, delivers performance, reliability and flexibility to enable and accelerate analytics at scale

PowerEdge R730 rack server

The mainstream 2S/2U PowerEdge R730 rack server is a datacenter workhorse, delivering functional flexibility to customers. The server’s combination of powerful processors and large memory, coupled with the DSSD D5, enables faster access to data to support near-or real-time decision making.

New performance testing conducted by Principled Technologies, Inc. shows that the DSSD D5 delivers low latency access to data and can meet the bandwidth requirements of hundreds of cores (tested with 352 cores), allowing customers to consolidate their SAS applications on a single platform, run more analytics in the same time period and enable more concurrent users and applications. While demonstrating near-linear scaling with eight Dell R730 servers, powered by Xeon processors E5-2699 v4, and running more than 800 and concurrent analytics jobs, DSSD D5 delivered a peak bandwidth of 22.8GB/s. In addition, the solution illustrated SAS CPU/real-time ratios greater than 1.0, even with eight servers, demonstrating that D5 was able to keep up with CPU demand for I/O while ensuring that all computing power was fully utilized.

The company also announced the availability of select PowerEdge servers with the DSSD client cards packaged together to be offered as a drop-in-the-box shipment. This year, the company expects to offer DSSD clientcards factory installed in select PowerEdge servers. Along with offering performance, reliability and flexibility, the firm’s solution accelerates deployment time and enhances ease of use.

DSSD D5 rack-scale flash enables customers to:

• 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

• Supporting near-or real-time decisions

Click to enlarge

Businesses are under pressure to use their data strategically to accelerate and improve decision-making while delivering next-generation business services. Faster data analysis helps organizations accelerate time to insight, improve the accuracy of analytics, expand analytics to more concurrent users and become more data driven.

Flash storage has become the preferred storage media for analytics applications – however, as both traditional and cloud-native technologies continue to churn out massive amounts of data, today’s data-driven organizations need approachable analytics for a growing number of users. With demand increasing for more sophisticated analytics that can support near- or real-time decisions, SAS analytics customers can leverage NVMe flash-based storage solutions, like DSSD D5 rack-scale flash, to reduce data management overhead made necessary by performance challenges associated with legacy infrastructure.

Availability:
The SAS analytics solution is currently available, and factory-installed DSSD cards will be offered later this year.

Mark Peters, practice director and senior analyst, ESG, said: “To support the most demanding contemporary use cases, flash and analytics need to go hand-in-hand. Thus, Dell EMC’s approach of integrating SAS analytics with its DSSD D5 is not only a logical next step in the evolution of Rack-Scale Flash, butis also indicative of how quickly busiesses are moving to real-time analytics as a foundation for proactive, reactive and preventative opportunities. This solution is further strengthened with the PowerEdge R730 server – which uses the fastest Intel processor available – to help speed critical analytics workloads and thereby enable faster decision making.“

Gary Spakes, practice director, global technology, SAS Institute Inc., said: “Dell EMC provides a fast, scalable x86-based server and storage solution for SAS applications. This allows customers to rapidly deploy and leverage a wide range of innovative SAS solutions. This new flash storage platform will accelerate data processing and allow scalability to solve our customer’s most data intensive analytic problems.“

Peter Kear, CEO, D4t4 Solutions Plc, said: “We are witnessing ever-increasing pressure on analytics workloads as larger data sets require faster processing and shorter response times. DSSD D5 offers our customers a massively scalable solution to those demands, giving them not just performance that can make a genuine difference to their business but also providing flexibility in resource allocation that maximizes the effectiveness of their flash storage. In simple terms, the speed of processing SAS workloads with DSSD D5, coupled with consistently low latency, delivers throughput that helps more users perform more analytics – this enables our customers to better exploit the value within their data for competitive advantage.“

Ashley Gorakhpurwalla, president, server division, Dell EMC, said: “A high performing and reliable technology infrastructure is critical to any analytics solution, especially as data sets continue to grow exponentially. The Dell EMC DSSD D5 and PowerEdge R730 server solution enables customers to scale their SAS applications as needed and accelerate the time to value of real-time analytics that improve business operations.“

John McCool, SVP and GM, DSSD, emerging technology division, Dell EMC, said: “Dell EMC, working closely with SAS, has set a high bar for performance and scalability. It’s our mission to continue raising that bar, offering meaningful solutions to address our customers’ most pressing challenges and enabling organizations to put real-time analytics at the forefront of their IT strategies.“

Additional resources:
Analyst Report – Exec Summary
Analyst Report
Infographic
Performance and Tuning Considerations for SAS on the Intel Xeon E5 v3  Series Processors and EMC DSSD D5 Rack-Scale Flash Appliance