Penguin Computing, Calxeda and Inktank Partner

Penguin Computing, Inc. is developing an efficient large scale cloud storage deployment with industry partners Calxeda, Inc. and Inktank Storage Inc.

Calxeda is a manufacturer of ARM based SoCs. Inktank is the company delivering Ceph – the massively scalable, open source, software-defined storage system.
 
The reference implementation integrates the distributed, scalable Ceph storage system with Penguin Computing’s power efficient UDX1, a server system based on Calxeda’s ARM-based Energy Core SoC. The UDX1 accommodates up to 48 servers and 36 HDDs in four rack units with a 5W power envelope per server, an order of magnitude less than traditional x86 based servers.

"Power, cooling and manageability have become the biggest challenges in modern datacenters and large scale cloud storage platforms like Ceph use scale-out architectures to deliver performance and fault tolerance," said Charles Wuischpard, CEO, Penguin Computing. "The UDX1 is the perfect server platform for Ceph. It provides a very high compute and storage density in an extremely low power envelope. The Ceph-UDX1 combination is the ideal large scale storage platform for the datacenter of the future and we are planning to deploy this type of solution in our own public HPC cloud Penguin Computing on Demand."

While the UDX1 is redefining server architecture with a low-power, high-density approach, the Ceph distributed storage system complements these features by running a distributed scalable storage cluster across a large number of systems. Ceph is a massively scalable, open source, software defined storage system. It comprises an object store, block store, and a POSIX- compatible distributed file system. The platform is capable of auto-scaling to the exabyte level and beyond, is self-healing and self-managing, and has no single point of failure. The UDX1 ARM-based servers enable Ceph clusters to deliver better performance per dollar with lower power consumption and higher rack density.

"The storage industry and its established players are being challenged by the software defined storage model that delivers scalability and reliability at a lower price point," said Bryan Bogensberger, CEO, Inktank. "Ceph was designed to provide scalability and fault tolerance required for large scale storage deployments on a variety of storage platforms. ARM based platforms like the UDX1 provide a unique advantage to gain efficiency and rack density that makes Ceph and ARM a great combination for large scale storage deployments."

Penguin, Inktank and Calxeda are working together to optimize the reference architecture by testing multiple permutations of UDX1 configurations for power efficiency and price/performance.

"Ceph is the ideal workload for low-power Calxeda SoCs," said Barry Evans, CEO and co-founder, Calxeda. "We are excited to be working with Penguin and Inktank to serve this market as demand for Ceph is skyrocketing with the explosion of media-rich data companies have to store and analyze."

The reference configuration comprises three energy cards that contain four servers per card with each server attached to three 4TB SATA drives. The system delivers performance comparable to a traditional server in a significantly smaller power envelope and higher storage density.