Amax Demos iSCSI Storage Cluster Solution With SSD and IB

AMAX Information Technologies, Inc., provider of high performance computing, dynamic storage and cloud appliance solutions, announced the StorMax-X2 iSCSI storage cluster solution.

Designed to process transactions in parallel and with very little overhead, the StorMax-X2 can deliver hundreds of GB/s of financial data, and speed access time by a factor of 100-1000X over traditional storage systems. This can be an advantage to enterprises that demand real-time data availability for I/O intensive applications requiring high transaction rates and rapid data access. The StorMax-X2 empowers companies such as high frequency financial traders to execute millions of orders a second and scan dozens of public and private marketplaces simultaneously, enabling them to spot trends before other investors can blink and changing orders and strategies within milliseconds.

Utilizing the SSD technology for highly scalable, low-latency storage access, the StorMax-X2 iSCSI storage cluster solution is for applications that require rapid access to data in financial services, analytics, databases and data warehouses, high performance computing, web 2.0, and cloud computing, which require real-time data to be available instantly. At the core of the new storage offering is a I/O storage accelerator software, which provides high-availability and scale-out design with integrated cluster management. The StorMax-X2 provides fast remote block storage access over an InfiniBand connection, delivering up to 8 million IOPS and over 20 GB/s of sustained traffic with access times of 70 microseconds, significantly outperforming most high-end storage systems, and integrating seamlessly into most data center infrastructures.

"With large amounts of data to be crunched and a compelling monetary incentive to do so, more and more financial firms are latching onto extreme IOPS as a key advantage in today’s competitive markets," said Asaf Somekh, Vice President of Solution Marketing at Mellanox. "With the AMAX StorMax-X2 iSCSI storage cluster, featuring Mellanox’s VSA storage fabric acceleration software, customers get the most scalable storage for their investment. And they will see this benefit quickly, as VSA provides a superior optimized storage transport engine, and a scale-out design that can maximize throughput with very little I/O overhead and access time."

"Our customers have benefited greatly from the AMAX StorMax Series, often achieving orders of magnitude in terms of achieving ultra-fast remote block storage access to SAN, DAS, or Flash based storage for enterprise deployments and traditional virtualized environments," said James Huang, Product Marketing Manager for AMAX. "Current proprietary storage database solutions create vendor lock-in, interoperability and scalability challenges. The StorMax-X2 was developed specifically to eliminate the application bottleneck resulting from slow storage I/O and can be scaled with increased capacity, therefore offering our financial customers a complete and more intuitive storage platform."

AMAX was demonstrating the StorMax-X2 at SIFMA Financial Services Technology Expo in New York from June 14 to 16, 2011.