Seagate and Newisys Demo Flash Storage Architecture Capable of 1TB/s

When speed matters in HPC storage, Seagate Technology plc and Newisys, Inc., a division of Sanmina Corporation, have the industry’s fastest flash storage design.

The two companies announced that 21 Newisys NSS-2601 with dual NSS-HWxEA Storage Server modules deployed with Seagate’s SAS 1200.2 SSD drives can be combined in a single 42U rack to achieve block I/O performance of 1TB/s with 5PB of storage. Each Newisys 2U server with 60 Seagate SSDs is capable of achieving bandwidth of 49GB/s.

“This is one of the highest storage densities ever achieved in the industry, and holds the potential for new breakthroughs in storage system performance,” said Brett Pemble, VP and GM, flash products, Seagate. “Our partnership with Newisys enables us to continue to innovate with how storage is architected.“

Applications that might benefit most from this flash solution include those where microseconds matter in processing massive amounts of data. These applications might include metadata caches for large data centers, as well as prediction models for financial markets, oil and gas, and weather that are constantly changing and in need of pushing the performance envelope in a constant race against time.

“This solution takes advantage of what high-performance SSDs can offer without sacrificing space, power, cooling or redundancy,” said Eugene McCabe, EVP, Newisys, product division, Sanmina. “Crossing the 1TB/s threshold in a single rack while leveraging industry standard products is a major milestone.“

The NSS-2601 enclosure supports 60 2.5″ SAS drives and two NSS-HWxEA Storage Server Modules. Each NSS-HWxEA Storage Server Module is a high-performance enterprise server covering a broad spectrum of cost-performance requirements. The HA, high density platform can be configured as a single socket (HW1EA) or dual socket (HW2EA) server supporting the E5-2600 v3/4 family of Xeon processors. The modules enable 32 12Gb SAS lanes each, and the enclosure supports the 12Gb/s data path completely through to the end devices. The solution includes full server redundancy and data-loss protection capabilities.

The Seagate 1200.2 SAS SSD is a 12Gb SAS device to optimize dual-channel throughput with up to 1,900MB/s sequential reads and offers multiple endurance choices within a single hardware and firmware design. It protects data from undetected, unintentional corruption and prevents unauthorized access with three levels of security. For enterprise and cloud customers also requiring high data availability, this SSD drive delivers the data integrity required in the event of an unexpected power loss.