Dot Hill Collaborates With Intel and Mellanox

Dot Hill Systems Corp. unveiled a new scale-out Lustre file serving solution in collaboration with Intel Corp. for software and management and Mellanox Technologies,  Ltd. for networking.

The Dot Hill parallel distributed file system solution provides a scalable infrastructure for use in a range of HPC industries such as meteorology, simulation, oil and gas, life science, rich media and finance.

The Lustre file system is scalable to hundreds of petabytes of storage across multiple storage arrays and servers. More than a TB/s of aggregate I/O throughput is possible with a properly sized configuration.

Aside from scaling to support hundreds of terabytes to petabytes, the solution is is built to address the distinctive signature HPC workloads that consist of many nodes or threads performing sequential access of very large files; while the workload of the individual node or thread is sequential in nature, the composite workload of many nodes or threads causes the underlying access pattern to become highly randomized.

“Extreme data analysis and data modeling is being employed by scientists and technologists who are tasked with solving the world’s toughest issues. Dot Hill storage has been engineered to maintain high performance for randomized sequential workloads. storage systems must adapt to this dynamic landscape by offering solutions that provide density, scalability and performance, and yet are simple to manage and affordable,” said Bill Wuertz, SVP of products and solutions, Dot Hill.

The backbone of the solution is the Dot Hill Ultra48 AssuredSAN 4004 and Ultra56 AssuredSAN 4004 storage arrays, which are designed to support both performance and reliability; two separate arrays function to preserve and manage access to both meta and primary data. The Ultra48 AssuredSAN 4004 provides small form factor SSDs and HDDs, which are for metadata operations; and the Ultra56 AssuredSAN 4004 supports up to 1.3PB with both flash and high capacity large form factor drives, which are for Lustre’s OST data.

Adaptive caching technologies are employed to accommodate dozens and even hundreds of independent streams of data without degrading overall throughput – critical for reliable, data streaming. In addition, the 99.999% availability of AssuredSAN products virtually eliminates downtime.

The Intel Enterprise Edition for Lustre software provides the high performance distributed file system and namespace component of the solution, which supports bandwidth, performance and scaling above and beyond traditional storage technology. It includes a set of management tools and a unified namespace, eliminating the need to micromanage storage pools.

“HPC is a powerful competitive advantage for today’s enterprises. Today, maximizing investments in HPC is measured in application-level performance, which requires proven scale-out storage solutions to overcome the limited performance and limited productivity common to most storage solutions today. Purpose-built for very high speed at massive scale, Intel Enterprise Edition for Lustre software makes storage simpler to manage and more productive,” said Brent Gorda, GM, Intel’s high performance data division.

Mellanox IB high-speed networking components and infrastructure support enhanced data rates up to 100Gb/s, which is the highest throughput and lowest latency interconnect available today. In addition, Mellanoix network solutions utilize RDMA protocols to make efficient use of computing resources. Using RDMA over IB, data transfer latencies can be reduced by more than 90% and CPU efficiencies can by elevated up to 96%.

Benefits of Dot Hill Scale-Out, High Performance Lustre File Serving Solution.

• Scalability is simplified through the addition of storage modules as needed to expand to petabytes of usable capacity. Each individual storage module can be configured with as much as 576TB of raw capacity.
• Performance of up to 6GB/s throughput is achieved with each individual storage module, and scaled linearly with added modules. IB network paths deliver up to 56Gb/s throughput to each compute node.
• HA is supported through redundant fail-over components as well as the ability to distribute the file system across multiple servers.
• Protection of valuable data sets is achieved through the use of enterprise components and drives, along with RAID technology.