LSI Entering Into HPC Storage

LSI Corporation introduced the Engenio 7900 HPC storage system which combines leading-edge performance and high levels of system availability for applications requiring uninterrupted data access. Designed for compute-intensive applications and high bandwidth workloads, the 7900 HPC storage system is ideally suited for environments with high volumes of data processing and computing demands such as government labs, defense, media and entertainment, energy, oil and gas, biosciences and geospatial companies.

Based on the LSITM seventh-generation XBB2 architecture, the 7900 HPC storage system provides industry-leading bandwidth of 6.4 GB/s on sustained reads from disk – a 4X performance improvement over the previous generation, and sustained write performance of 5.4 GB/s. The system also provides enhanced availability and reliability features designed to help ensure continuous high-speed data accessibility and protection across a wide-range of high-performance computing (HPC) workloads. High availability features include fully-redundant components and data paths with automated failover, online administration, drive health monitoring, controller cache mirroring and hardware-assisted RAID 6.

"In today’s HPC environments, it is no longer enough to provide storage systems featuring high bandwidth alone," said Steve Hochberg, senior director, HPC segment, LSI. "HPC customers have come to require storage solutions that also deliver the highest levels of data availability and very high performance across mixed workloads resulting in maximum computational efficiency. The Engenio 7900 HPC storage system is uniquely positioned to deliver on these requirements while providing the flexibility to meet future project needs."

The 7900 HPC storage system is also designed to seamlessly adapt to evolving infrastructure, application and capacity requirements. It offers field-replaceable host interface options, including 4 Gb/s Fibre Channel (FC) and 20 Gb/s InfiniBand; flexible RAID protection levels (0, 1, 3, 5, 6 and 10) to meet the protection/performance requirements of the most demanding applications; and linear scalability up to 256 FC or SATA drives at initial release. Subsequent releases will provide scalability up to 480 drives and support for future technologies including 8 Gb/s FC and 40 Gb/s InfiniBand. The configuration flexibility of the system allows customers to mix host interfaces, RAID levels and disk drives in a single system for optimized price/performance and investment protection.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), the Department of Energy’s largest science and energy laboratory, purchased four Engenio 7900 HPC beta systems utilizing an InfiniBand interface and over 1 petabyte of storage, in September 2007.

"Since installation of the 7900 HPC we have been impressed with the reliability and overall mature state of the product prior to general availability," said Shane Canon, ORNL project leader. "The cache mirroring feature is a strength, as is the ability to create flexible configurations that meet the needs of a diversified cross section of processing requirements. We worked closely with LSI and were pleased with our interaction with their field and engineering staff."

The XBB2 architecture benefits from more than thirty years of LSI design knowledge and storage expertise. With well over 50 petabytes deployed in HPC environments and nearly 400,000 systems shipped across a wide range of workloads and market segments, LSI Engenio storage systems are trusted by the world’s leading OEMs to deliver superior performance and reliability that meets customers’ escalating data management requirements.

A demonstration of the Engenio 7900 HPC storage system will be available in Booth D42 at the International Supercomputing Conference taking place, June 17-20 at the International Congress Center in Dresden, Germany.

The Engenio 7900 HPC storage system is available today through select OEM partners.

Additional information on the 7900 HPC