Cray Addresses HSM for Big Data and HPC

Cray Inc. introduced an open storage archiving solution for big data and supercomputing with the launch its Tiered Adaptive Storage (TAS).

Through a strategic partnership with Versity Software, Inc., Cray has developed a deployment-ready, flexible tiered archiving solution designed to be easy to use, reduce costs and preserve data indefinitely.

TAS includes all software and hardware, eliminating complexities associated with planning, designing, and building large-scale archives. It ensures data protection and accessibility at scale, and during upgrades – an essential attribute as the lifespan of data typically exceeds the useful life of storage infrastructure.

The latest addition to Cray’s line of storage and data management solutions, TAS can be provisioned as a primary file storage system with tiers, as well as a persistent storage archive. It provides transparent data migration across storage tiers – from fast scratch to primary and archive storage. It features up to four flexible storage tiers mixing media, solid state drive, disk or tape, and simplifies storage management with familiar, easy-to-use archive commands for storage operators.

“Our new data management product gives supercomputing and big data customers the ability to more effectively access, manage, and preserve their exponentially increasing amounts of data,” said Barry Bolding, Cray’s VP of storage and data management. “Today, Cray is at the forefront of scalable, parallel file system storage. With the launch of Cray TAS, we now have a complete tiered storage and archiving solution that combines our scaling expertise with proven block storage and tape technologies, while also providing integration with HSM features in future versions of the Lustre file system. To make Cray TAS even more compelling, we have integrated Versity’s open-format virtualization technologies that manage and optimize customer data across multiple storage tiers to provide best-in-class HSM.”

Cray recently made a strategic investment in Versity, recognizing Versity’s ability to integrate its large-scale archival storage software into the TAS solution. The company’s core technology, the Versity Storage Manager, features an advanced, standards-based software architecture, supporting virtually unlimited archive size.

“Cray is widely respected for introducing high-quality solutions that are innovative and highly scalable, and because we take the same approach in designing our products, we believe the technology behind our Versity Storage Manager is a perfect match for Cray’ TAS solution,” said Harriet Coverston, Versity’s co-founder and CTO. “We are very proud of our partnership with Cray, and we are excited to introduce Cray TAS to the storage marketplace.”

The TAS solution is the latest addition to Cray’s portfolio of storage and data management offerings. The company recently introduced Cray Cluster Connect, a complete Lustre storage solution for x86 Linux clusters. Cray Cluster Connect is a compute agnostic storage and data management offering that allows customers to utilize their Linux compute environment of choice – providing customers with a complete, end-to-end, Lustre solution consisting of hardware, networking, software, architecture and support.

Cray also offers a storage appliance solution using Cray Sonexion – a scale out storage system that reduces deployment time and simplifies storage management for high performance solutions. It addresses a range of customers as it provides performance scalability from gigabytes to terabytes per-second in a single file system and performs optimally at scale. Cray is also an original founder and board member of OpenSFS – a consortium focused on advancing Lustre capabilities and keeping Lustre open – and is following the OpenSFS roadmap for Lustre.

The TAS solution will be on display in the Cray booth at the 2013 Supercomputing Conference held November 17-22 in Denver, CO.