Cray Refreshes Storage Line With Sonexion 2000 System

Cray Inc. announced the Sonexion 2000 system, an addition to its line of scale-out Lustre storage solutions.

The Sonexion system combines Cray’s expertise in designing, scaling and managing end-to-end Lustre solutions with a architecture that allows for scalability. Sonexion 2000 features 50% more performance and capacity than its predecessor in the same storage footprint, and provides more than 45GB/s of performance and 2TB of useable capacity in a single rack.

Reliability, availability and serviceability enhancements are bolstered by GridRAID, a declustered parity protection system for Sonexion. It accelerates rebuild times by up to three-and-a-half times more than conventional hardware RAID-6. Through Cray Cluster Connect, the Sonexion 2000 works with any Linux cluster.

“Our Sonexion 2000 system is the culmination of years of Cray experience in providing the world’s most scalable parallel file systems,” said Barry Bolding, VP marketing and business development, Cray. “The platform combines industry-leading performance with simplified deployments, greater scalability and faster data rebuild times to meet the most demanding production customer requirements. It is the perfect cap to a year in which we have refreshed our entire line of compute, big data analytics and storage products.“

Available, the Sonexion 2000 system is an integrated, scale-out Lustre storage system designed for a range of supercomputing workloads. The system can scale throughput performance to nearly two terabytes-per-second in a single file system. Sonexion 2000 also features an increase in Scalable Storage Unit (SSU) useable capacity with up to 360TB per SSU.

Several of HPC centers have recently signed contracts for Sonexion 2000 systems, including the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) in Lugano, Switzerland, the Met Office in the UK, as well as the Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Army Research Laboratory in USA.

Complementing the Sonexion 2000 system is Cray’s line of storage and data management solutions. The recently announced DataWarp applications I/O accelerator bridges the performance gap between compute resources and disk-based storage. Cray’s Tiered Adaptive Storage solution includes the TAS Connector for Lustre to simplify managing data from high performance storage to deep tape archives.