DDN SFA14K and SFA14KE: Hybrid Storage and Hyper-Converged Platforms

DataDirect Networks, Inc. (DDN) announced the availability of the SFA14K and SFA14KE, performance hybrid storage and hyper-converged platforms.

The SFA14K and SFA14KE deliver fast, densest storage with more than six million IO/s and 60GB/s in 4U with scalability to nearly 7PB of capacity in a single rack. The SFA14K delivers hybrid block storage array performance. The SFA14KE hyper-converged solution allows users to leverage the power of the SFA14K performance while leveraging the embedded processor power to run VMs, embedded applications and file systems within the storage array to reduce complexity, latency and data center footprint.

Data intensive enterprise and HPC organizations are requiring a groundbreaking new approach to data compute, storage and management that allows them to keep pace with the rapid acceleration of processor power and both machine and sensor generated data. Data is being created at a staggering rate and needs to be stored efficiently while being quickly available to analyze and leverage for strategic decision making. Today’s organizations need new architectural designs that can support the full power of advanced individual component technologies with efficiency and integration at scale.

While the company delivers software-only options for both the IME application acceleration and WOS object storage offerings, and embraces the need for commodity hardware to fill a necessary space in the datacenter, proprietary hardware platforms are in increasingly urgent demand for environments requiring high density performance and capacity coupled with low latency for analytics and file storage.

“Fast-paced growth in large-scale data workflows has created hardware sprawl and IO bottlenecks throughout the datacenter. Rapid growth and intensive usage patterns of data place rigorous demands on storage infrastructures,” said George Crump, president, Storage Switzerland. “Storage and server architectures based on decade-old technologies, retrofitted to include next-generation processors, interconnects and SSD are rife with performance bottlenecks, reliability challenges, and the inability to be integrated as a unified platform. We are excited to see DDN’s fresh approach and outside-the-box thinking as it delivers truly game-changing solutions that solve data access, workflow and analytics challenges.“

“DDN is focused on solving data intensive challenges at large scale. As the trusted storage infrastructure provider of two-thirds of the largest computing sites around the globe, we understand the magnitude of the challenges our users encounter in getting the most out of the latest processor and network performance capabilities,” said Molly Rector, CMO, EVP, product management and WW marketing, DDN. “While many storage vendors have discontinued investing in hardware innovation, DDN consistently executes upon a product strategy to break through bottlenecks in the data center. And while DDN has embraced the movement to deliver software technology on commodity hardware, we also recognize that commodity storage platforms simply cannot keep pace with rapidly increasing compute power, network bandwidth and the latest generation NVMe and SSD speeds.“

SFA14K and SFA14KE storage platforms
As the new flagship product in company’s most established product line, the SFA14K provides customers with a simple route to take advantage of a suite of technologies including the latest processor technologies, NVMe SSD, PCIe 3, EDR IB and Omni-Path.

“In today’s world of massive data, superior interconnect performance capabilities are critical for big data and HPC applications to provide the highest storage and retrieval performance, efficiency and scalability,” said Gilad Shainer, VP, marketing, Mellanox Technologies, Ltd. “Mellanox’s EDR 100Gb/s IB interconnect with onboard Multi-host and SR-IOV technology provides DDN with the highest interconnect performance compared with any other solution, as well as backwards and future compatibility. The SFA14K will help organizations keep up with the escalating demands for data retrieval and processing and will enable unprecedented performance on mission-critical applications.“

By integrating high-performance technologies from silicon, to interconnect, memory and storage, the SFA14K changes the future of HPC architecture design. The SFA14K delivers groundbreaking latency reduction, IO acceleration and increases the power of the innovation that can be delivered from each rack of data center equipment. The SFA14K deliver,any advantages including:

• Fast hybrid storage and hyper-converged architectures: More than six million IO/s and 60GB/s in 4U and up to 16x higher per rack performance than its closest competitor;

• High density storage: Nearly 7PB in a single rack, leveraging NVMe memory along with hybrid solid state and HDD storage in a single system;

• Efficiency for mixed workloads: Accelerates small, large and mixed IO workloads in a unified solution that alternatively would require a dedicated SSD array for small files and a scale-out system for throughput from alternative vendors;

• Widest breadth of interconnect options: Options include IB, Omni-Path, FC and Ethernet;

• Embedded PCIe fabric: 10x to 100x latency reduction when replacing non-integrated alternative options from application to memory to storage;

• Flexible, multi-dimensional scaling: Scales up or scales out to allow users to buy only what they need today to optimize performance, capacity or both;

• Management simplicity at scale: With utmost simplicity at scale, the solution’s hyper-convergence benefits reduce administration costs by 50 to 70% over integrating and managing each discrete technology individually.

“With the 14K platform, DDN is departing from traditional high-performance storage approaches, fortifying its innovation leadership and transforming the speed, ease and efficiency by which Enterprise and HPC customers can solve their most complex data and analytics challenges,” added Rector. “Our unmatched architecture integrates and takes maximum advantage of the latest, most advanced component technologies to drive extreme efficiency for mixed workloads, provide the widest breadth of interconnect options and the flexibility to scale up or to scale out to allow for optimized performance, density or both.”

The SFA14K hybrid block storage and SFA14KE hyper-converged storage offerings are available and shipping.