DDN Unveils Fast Multi-Level Security Lustre Solution

DataDirect Networks, Inc. (DDN) announced a multi-level security solution (MLS) for Lustre, aimed at addressing growing use cases for HPC workflows in markets that require HPC-level performance but with increased security requirements, such as financial services, genomics and government organizations.

MLS Lustre solution provides the performance, scale and openness needed in HPC and big data enterprises, while also allowing organizations to meet high multi-level security requirements.

“Big data and HPC users are under constant pressure to improve time to results while ensuring data security and privacy,” said Steve Conway, VP, research, HPC, IDC. “An added challenge is maintaining these standards in environments where data sharing and collaboration are happening. DDN’s MLS Lustre Solution is designed to deliver highly secure file systems that minimize overhead and efficiently scale workloads in today’s data-intensive data centers.“

Combining community work in open source with firm-developed features, the solution delivers Lustre isolation suitable for a variety of security requirements.

“We have taken a flexible and adaptive approach to multi-level security that combines recent community advances with DDN-developed Lustre features to deliver full Lustre isolation, while minimizing the performance impact of the system overhead associated with implementing security,” said Robert Triendl, SVP, global sales, marketing and field services, DDN. “This approach lets us customize configurations that meet our customers’ security requirements without them having to sacrifice workflow efficiency.“

Simpler to administer and more cost effective than maintaining a siloed infrastructure for sensitive data, the MLS Lustre Solution combines the following community and DDN elements to deliver performance:

• EXAScaler appliances bring centralized configuration and management, as well as density, performance and scale with Intel Enterprise Edition for Lustre.

• SE Linux provides a strong security foundation.

• Containerization with Docker isolates user data.

• Kerberos, a network authentication protocol, handles user authentication.

• A complete solution that delivers up to 2x the performance of competitive offerings.

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Built on EXAScaler ES14KX Lustre parallel file system appliance and Intel Enterprise Edition for Lustre, MLS Lustre Solution is for government, health and life sciences, research labs, financial and other data-intensive organizations handling sensitive data. It facilitates compliance with a range of security standards, while maintaining the performance levels required by HPC environments, which are crucial capabilities given the trends of increased security across government and research institutions, the growing breadth of research relying on personalized data, and the increasing use of parallel file systems by HPC, large commercial enterprises and big data environments.

In addition to the multi-level security features, ES14KX leverages the benefits and features of Intel EE for Lustre software 2.7, such as in-band and out-of-band read cache hinting, project quotas back-end, metadata scaling improvements, single-client read improvement and a retrofit monitoring framework.