NetApp HPS Rack Solution For Commercial and Technical HPCs

Technology advances have made HPC more affordable, extending the benefits beyond traditional scientific and military applications to a broader set of commercial and university applications.

As the need to work with growing datasets becomes common, organizations are discovering that the resources required to address big data challenges exceed the capabilities of existing infrastructure, as well as the expertise and process knowledge of supporting staff. And, while the volume of data generated by emerging commercial industries such as manufacturing, life sciences, and higher education can provide key business insights, these organizations are limited by the complexity of existing HPC systems in the market.

NetApp, Inc. is helping customers with these deployment and management challenges with the announcement of the High-Performance Storage (HPS) Rack.

The prepackaged and pre-configured storage solution delivers performance that scales to help manage ever-increasing data growth. It includes pre-configured servers, management and monitoring software, and the open-source Lustre parallel file system, enabling organizations to shorten deployment time from months to days, lower risk, reduce TCO, and speed time to results.

"Storage system deployment and management needs to be simplified for more industries to reap the benefits of high-performance computing," said Brendon Howe, VP, Product and Solutions Marketing, NetApp. "The NetApp HPS Rack integrates critical building blocks and removes many of the deployment challenges associated with HPC management, ultimately helping customers deploy low-risk solutions that unlock innovation quickly and gain critical competitive advantage in their markets."

The HPS Rack is built on the NetApp E-Series platform. These solutions process, analyze, manage, and access data at scale to meet customers’ needs in industries requiring applications with dedicated workloads, including oil and gas, financial services, media and entertainment, high-performance computing, and the public sector. Customers can spark innovation, make better decisions, and drive business outcomes at the speed of today’s business.

Additionally, the HPS Rack can integrate Terascala LustreStack software to provide management and extensive analytics. With LustreStack, customers get a Lustre-based solution that deploys in minutes, is easy to manage, and is tuned for applications and workflows. Administrators can get the performance and scalability benefits of Lustre without the need for any in-house expertise, bringing rapid deployment, simplicity, and faster time to results to big data and HPC environments.

"For fast insight to action, the best software and hardware needs to be employed to achieve the highest levels of performance for our researchers," said Scott Kornblum, managing director, Thesys Technologies, LLC, the infrastructure affiliate of Tradeworx. "Once we started running our NetApp E5400 and E2600 with Terascala’s LustreStack, it became dramatically easier for us to manage resources, helping us reduce costs. We can now monitor performance in real time and provide 5GB per second of throughput to our research group, giving them the tools they need to test and model new algorithms concurrently."

"By integrating with the NetApp HPS Rack, we make it fast and easy for commercial organizations to install, tune, and manage high-performance storage solutions," said Steve Butler, CEO, Terascala. "There is a complete set of tools for system monitoring, application tuning, and event logging and alerts, as well as data workflow management. With improved throughput and less time spent managing the system, customers can get to their results much faster."

The NetApp HPS Rack will be demonstrated at SC12 Conference in Salt Lake City, UT, from November 10-16.

Highlights

• The HPS Rack is a pre-configured solution that allows customers to achieve faster time to results by reducing the time and resources needed to architect, design, and implement HPC storage configurations.
• Optimized for Lustre, NetApp and Terascala solutions enable administrators to deploy, manage, and maintain their environment to achieve results faster and at low risk.
• NetApp E-Series is optimized for performance, processing efficiency, and density needs.
• The solution enables real-time data collection for application-driven tuning.