DataDirect Serves File Systems Natively

DataDirect Networks, Inc. (DDN) announced that users can now reduce infrastructure and scale out complexity with a new file-system hosting feature enabled by DDN’s Storage Fusion Architecture.

Flexible Building Blocks: The design concepts of SFA are delivered across multiple controller and storage device platforms to encompass a comprehensive storage portfolio featuring DAS, SAN, NAS and VTL storage access.

With the first product to feature this capability, the SFA10000E Open Storage Appliance, users will now be able to host and serve scale-out file systems natively from the industry’s leading transactional bandwidth storage system. These scale-out storage building blocks are designed to eliminate the need for external storage switching and file system gateways, radically reducing the cost and complexity of parallel file storage deployments.

The Open Appliance offerings from DDN will include both the DDN ExaScaler platform, featuring the Lustre File System, and the DDN GridScaler platform, featuring IBM’s General Parallel File System. These parallel file systems will be offered with either InfiniBand or 10Gb Ethernet LAN connectivity options to deliver over 5GB/s of performance per SFA10000E Open Appliance Building Block. These high-availability Building Blocks can be scaled within a clustered storage environment to achieve industry-leading levels of performance beyond 200GB/s.

"Designed for the petaFLOP/s computing era, the DDN SFA10000E is an ideal product to serve as a foundation for the launch of our Open Storage Appliance program. It is precision engineered for scale out HPC environments requiring the highest levels of data intensive computing performance," explains Jeff Denworth, VP of Marketing at DDN. "By embedding these popular HPC file systems natively into this scale-out platform, we achieve a dramatic reduction in storage cluster components, I/O latency and most importantly – new levels of cost savings and management efficiency for our customers."

Announced in June of 2009, the DDN Storage Fusion Architecture has been designed from the ground-up to serve the evolving needs of massively scalable multi-core environments. The first SFA product, the SFA10000, delivers a revolutionary combination of transactional and streaming performance – 10 GB/s of read and write bandwidth and over one million IOPS. Also designed for large data pools and leading storage density, the SFA10000 can manage up to 2.4 petabytes of storage in only two data center floor tiles. DDN has engineered advanced flexibility and data integrity features to service the needs of dynamic HPC centers by combining functionalities such as high-speed mirrored storage cache, support for multiple RAID levels and SSD, SAS and SATA disk drives for storage tiering, intelligent cache optimization, SATAssure data protection and InfiniBand and Fibre Channel host port options.

Open Appliance configurations will be generally available from DDN in Q1 of 2010.