… EMC Confirms VNX HPC Integrated With Terascala LustreStack

EMC Corporation announced the new VNX HPC series, a preconfigured hardware and software appliance designed to simplify complex Lustre environments for commercial HPC customers.

It includes metadata and object servers, EMC VNX5100 metadata storage, VNX7500 object storage and the Terascala, Inc.‘s LustreStack software suite-delivering 10s of GB/s bandwidth and 10s of petabytes of capacity. The HPC series expands the company’s commitment to the HPC market.

The Lustre SAN file system-which was developed for and powers top supercomputers by delivering performance and scalability-is also known for its complexities associated with compatibility, deployment and ongoing configuration changes needed to deliver performance.

Most commercial organizations that require the performance benefits of Lustre do not have the time, budget or required training to deploy and manage it. With the VNX HPC series, companies such as financial services, life sciences, manufacturing and oil and gas now have the option of utilizing Lustre with enterprise reliability and simplified end-to-end management.

VNX HPC Series Technology Highlights:
Benefits of the VNX HPC series include new connectivity and scalability levels to meet the demands of Lustre workloads.

• Bandwidth: VNX HPC series offers a base configuration delivering 8GB/sec read and 5.3GB/s write performance with bandwidth expansion modules for linear scalability beyond 10s of GB/s reads and writes as measured by XDD benchmark.
• Capacity: Supports 720TB and scales to 10s of Petabytes with the new capacity expansion modules.
• IB support: Adds high throughput and low latency IB connectivity to the Lustre Parallel File System.
• Simplification: Saves three to four weeks per year in deployment and upgrade time for a typical Lustre file system, with dashboard monitoring and single support contact.
• Reliability: Delivers reliability with five-nines availability and worldwide support.

Terri McClure, senior analyst, ESG, said: "Lustre is one of the most powerful file systems on the market for handling HPC workloads and a natural fit for emerging commercial HPC applications. But the management complexity, especially in fast growing environments, can be daunting. Many of these organizations don’t have the resources to take full advantage of complex Lustre based implementations. EMC is helping to change that with its VNX HPC series solution, which is appliance based for easy deployments and integrated with Terascala for simple end-to-end management and EMC global support."

Brandon Sanders, director of Strategy and Technology, Data Strategy, said: "The combination of EMC’s VNX and Terascala’s LustreStack is very powerful-both for Data Strategy’s customers, and for EMC’s partners, who rely on best-in-class storage to satisfy customer demand for these types of solutions. This latest innovation from EMC is shaking up HPC storage and making the benefits accessible to a wide range of customers, ensuring that this important segment of the market has the power of simplified storage management at its fingertips."

Eric Herzog, SVP of Product Management and Product Marketing, EMC Unified Storage Division, said: "Since EMC introduced VNX to the market, we have seen significant interest from the commercial HPC community in using EMC unified storage for Lustre-based HPC environments. With EMC’s new VNX HPC series, the benefits of Lustre are now attainable without the barrier of complexity. Our focus on simplicity opens the door to commercial HPC storage management, ensuring that all organizations can capture the combined benefits of Lustre and EMC’s VNX family."