DDN Delivering Burst Buffer Appliance and Updating Block and File Appliances

DataDirect Networks, Inc. (DDN) announced several products, solutions and updates, completing a refresh to its entire product line that began in September with the announcement of a high-density, performance object storage appliance (WOS8460).

These additions include a refresh of the 14K-based products (DDN SFA14KX, SFA14KXE, GS14KX and ES14KX), an updated OS with new capabilities, a Burst Buffer Appliance (IME240) based on commodity hardware, and the company’s Multi-Level Security (MLS) Solution for Lustre environments (announced separately).

With enhanced performance, scale, density and a number of net features, the firm refreshed product line delivers the power to solve the toughest challenges in HPC and data-intensive enterprise environments, such as mixed I/O performance and rapid data growth. These top challenges were highlighted in the company’s HPC Trends Survey. With this latest refresh, company’s product suite advances data center modernization with flash technologies, improved platform performance and the expanded the use of open platforms.

“Intersect360 Research is forecasting worldwide spending on storage for HPC applications to surpass $5 billion in 2016, continuing to grow faster than the market rate to over $6.5 billion in 2020, as organizations continue to invest in technologies to optimize for data-hungry workloads,” said Addison Snell, CEO, Intersect360 Research. “With its investments in object storage and ‘burst buffer’ technologies, DDN is staying on top of the forward-looking technologies that will shape the next several years.“

SFA14KX, SFA14KXE, GS14KX and ES14KX storage platforms
With the SFA14KX, SFA14KXE, GS14KX and ES14KX added to its line of storage solutions, the company provides customers with flexible options to take advantage of a suite of new technologies and interconnects including SAS SSD, NVMe, IB, Omni-Path and processor technologies including the Intel fifth-generation Broadwell processor, which is available across all DDN14KX-based appliances.

The SFA14KX delivers hybrid block storage array performance, while the SFA14KXE, GS14KX and ES14KX converged solutions allow users to leverage the power of In-Storage Processing to embed applications or parallel file systems within the storage array for the significant reduction of complexity, latency and data center footprint.

The storage platforms deliver the fast, dense storage with more than six million IO/s and 60GB/s in 4U with scalability to more than 9PB in a single rack.

IME240 and software-snly IME
The firm has expanded its IME product line by adding the ME240 appliance and is also marketing IME as software-only, making IME the industry’s first open-platform burst buffer that is not tied to a specific server or storage vendor’s products. The IME240 is a 2U server with 24 drives that the power of NVMe to deliver up to 20Gb/s. The market is moving toward more openness and, as it did with its WOS product line and IME, the company is giving customers more architectural flexibility and choice with both appliance and software-only options.

Appliance delivery models allow organizations to deploy complete, preconfigured solutions with end-to-end 24/7 support, while software-defined architectures give customers complete configuration flexibility and control.

SFA OS 3.1
The SFAOS 3.1 brings together the numerous, versatile capabilities that the company has released independently across many of its products this past year and makes them available across all products in the SFA line – including converged GRIDScaler and EXAScaler file-system appliances.

The OS supports the Broadwell processors, which are available within firm’s storage solutions and which provide more cores, firm’s In-Storage Processing efficiency and support the company’s platforms’ peak performance requirements.

In-Storage Processing feature removes latency and bottlenecks to accelerate applications and enables workflows to scale more efficiently, while reducing the number of components to manage, power and house.

“Over the past couple of months, DDN has refreshed every single aspect of our product line,” said Robert Triendl, SVP, global sales, marketing, and field services, DDN. “These efforts underscore DDN’s unrelenting commitment to lead technology innovation for high-performance computing and to give our customers the best solutions to optimize performance and efficiency in what are some of the most challenging IT environments in the world.“

The company will showcase its latest storage solutions in HPC at the SC16 conference in Salt Lake City, UT.

Availability:

The SFA14KX, SFA14KXE, GS14KX, ES14KX and software-only IME solutions are available and shipping.
SFA OS 3.1 is also available and shipping with all new products.
The DDN IME240 will ship in volume in 1Q17.

Resources:
SFA14KX, SFA14KXE, GS14KX and ES14KX
DDN IME
DDN MLS Lustre solution
End-to-end storage and big data platforms