Voltaire / Supermicro RapidStorage Appliance for HPC

Voltaire Ltd. announced a new solution with Super Micro Computer, Inc. that delivers fast, scalable and cost-effective storage for high performance clusters. The RapidStorage Appliance is a building block for massively scalable high performance storage systems that can deliver millions of I/O operation per second (IOPS) and hundreds of Gigabytes/second (GB/s) with 100X faster access time than traditional storage systems.

The RapidStorage Appliance consists of Supermicro high-density Double-Sided Storage servers and Voltaire Storage Accelerator (VSA) software. Using Voltaire’s 10GbE or InfiniBand switches, multiple appliances can be interconnected to form a scalable and unified system with dozens of high-speed links serving data to clients.

In a recent benchmark test at a large financial services institution, a cluster of five VSA-powered appliances delivered 2.5 million IOPS and 30 GB/s of sustained traffic, with access times of 70 microseconds, significantly outperforming most high-end storage systems, and at a fraction of the cost.

The solution is available through select Supermicro and Voltaire resellers and VARs.

"Storage I/O bottlenecks present a major challenge for high performance, data-intensive environments that, until now, required big IT budgets to attempt to eliminate them," said Asaf Somekh, vice president of marketing, Voltaire. "With the Voltaire-Supermicro RapidStorage Appliance, customers can finally get incredibly fast storage access and colossal scalability at a reasonable price point."

"This solution presents a major advancement in high-performance storage and enables customers to deploy petabytes of fast storage in just a few racks," said Tau Leng, PhD, General Manager of Marketing and HPC solutions at Supermicro. "Our SC417 Double-Sided Storage™ features exceptional density and accessibility, which enables the RapidStorage Appliance to not only deliver excellent performance, but also offer a unique solution to the storage market."

Voltaire’s VSA software is storage acceleration and clustering solution that provides fast remote block storage access over 10GbE and InfiniBand fabrics. VSA software leverages iSCSI or iSER (iSCSI RDMA Extension) to maximize throughput and process many transactions in parallel with little I/O overhead.

Supermicro’s newest Double-Sided Storage server SC417 currently supports up to 43TB of hot-swap SAS2 storage capacity in 4U. While the previous maximum in the market was 48 drives in the front, Supermicro has added 24 more hot-swap drives in the rear of the SC417 to deliver more storage capacity.