Inspur Reveals SmartRack4.5 Integrated Infrastructure

The data center product and solutions provider Inspur Electronic Information Industry Co.,Ltd showcased its cloud computing solutions at IDF16.

The company also launched the rack scale server, SmartRack4.5, which is based on the 2.0 integrated infrastructure. This product is designed for public cloud users, cloud service providers and telecommunication operators; with its newly added SAS, PCIe switching technology and the battery backup node of BBS (Battery Backup System) on top of the centralized power supply, cooling and management. These elements help centralize external IT resources and allow the reconstruction and pooling of internal resources.

Data centers are moving towards more structural, modular and intensified upgrades and modifications. Thomas Zhou, senior research manager, IDC, said: “In the next five years, more than 60% of the data centers investment growth will come from hyperscale data centers, and the modular isomorphism will be one of the main characteristics of the hyperscale data centers.“

The company developed the SmartRack as the integrated infrastructure solution for the next generation of data centers. Compared with other products, the design of the rack scale server has the enhanced speed of deployment to up to 8-10 times. The density of deployment compared with conventional products, has been doubled. Currently, the iteration of the product has come to generation 4.5, and the shipments have totaled to more than 100 thousand nodes and cover more than 70% of the China rack scale server market, achieving a large scale deployment in cloud service providers, namely with Alibaba Group Holding Limited, and Baidu, Inc.

The BBS battery backup node that is newly added to the SmartRack 4.5 can maintain the energy efficiency at around 94%, while efficiency of the conventional centralized UPS power supply is less than 80%. BBS, being a plug and play node, increases the energy efficiency by large. What’s more, when there is a power failure in the generator, it can supply stable power for at least 15 minutes – ensuring the rack scale server’s reliability.

Additionally, the firm has been enhancing the flexibility of the SmartRack. Based on the original five types of high performance storage, high temperature corrosion-resistant, cold storage and high density computing racks, using the switch technology of SAS and PCIe, SmartRack has developed into two forms of product – specifically, the elastic storage expansion and the PCIe expansion pooling.

The SmartRack PCIe expansion pooling node, when combined with the BOX node of 1U, can achieve the resource pooling of co-processing computing, high performance storage, and, warm and cold storage, based on the PCIe protocol. A single computing node can be docked to several BOX nodes, which can achieve more than eight GPU/MIC/FPGA co-processing computing resource pools, or at least twenty NVMe SSD warm storage resource pools. The flexible storage node expansion, when combined with the JBOD module, can provide twenty SAS/SATA/SSD HDD storage resource pools.

John Hu, VP, Inspur Group, said: “Using the SAS and PCI-E, switching technology can overcome the fundamental limitations of IT resource expansion, allowing the two types of resources – which are storage and PCI-E expansion – to decouple with computing resources. This can achieve the flexible resource allocation of storage and co-processing computing to meet the demands of the increasingly complex applications, and other business needs. In the future, these two types of technology will be broadly used in the application of deep learning, voice search, video conversion, image search, nearline storage, distributed storage and other types of public cloud services.“