Perseus HPC Scalable Storage Solution From Raid, Inc.

Raid Incorporated has created Perseus based on IBM Corp.‘s GSS building block architecture with the full functionality of GPFS (General Parallel File System). The result is a customizable and versatile storage solution that addresses the demanding needs of technical computing or big data environment.

Builing Blocks

Perseus is a cost-effective technology and is also scalable; it offers the ability to scale from 10GB/s sustained performance – using 480TB – to whatever performance and capacity a customer needs by adding more building block modules.

Perseus combines IBM’s novel native RAID technology with commercial JBODS and IBM’s X86 servers into a storage building block that scales in both capacity and performance, all at an affordable price. Raid Inc. can customize the base building-block design by adding a series of SSD EDOBs for a tiered implementation or increase the I/O performance of the servers by modifying the specifications.

Perseus Building Blocks: Data Integrity and Reduced Latency
The solution realizes both performance, acceleration and higher availability through the use of declustered RAID techniques. An additional benefit of this technology includes much faster RAID rebuild times with virtually nonexistent performance hits when drives fail or are replaced. In addition, Perseus provides end-to-end checksums on both reads and writes, as well as dropped write detection from the clients to disk

More Than Just Storage Solution
With the newest GPFS server software already configured on every Perseus solution, customers will get the benefit of GPFS without incurring additional cost.

Those benefits go beyond a high performance clustered parallel file system
with global namespace, including a full-featured set of file and system management tools:

Storage Virtualization
Integrated HA Features
Automated Tiered Storage Management
Data Replication
ILM
Snapshots and File Cloning
Active File Management
Ease of Administration
Rolling Upgrades
User, Group, and Project (Filesystem) Quotas

Raid Inc. will customize each solution, leveraging any combination of the feature sets listed above to solve each customer’s need. The customization can also extend to adding various hardware, software, or appliances to any solution. For example, Tivoli HSM software with a tape library can be tied into the ILM feature for automatic backups or a big data appliance with analytics can be added to the solution.

High Performance Scale-Out NAS
Raid Inc. can also extend each Perseus solution to add additional capabilities. For example, Perseus is a platform on which to build a high performance scale-out NAS solution by combining GPFS with CNFS.

This brings benefits as compared to a NAS-only solution such as:

Growing capacity dynamically
Providing a single, global view into all content
Increasing bandwidth to data and reducing latency where required
Managing data across the life cycle
Providing consistent access to data with minimal down time

Mixed Topologies
This scale-out NAS still offers the benefits of GPFS, so customers can have both a clustered NAS and a high-performance GPFS clustered file system. With additional services, CNFS clients would be able to connect to a global namespace managed on one or more Perseus building blocks.