DDN HPC Storage Solutions and Monitoring Tools

DataDirect Networks, Inc. (DDN) announced HPC storage solutions and capabilities at the International Conference for HPC, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC17) in Denver, CO.

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These solutions include an entry-level burst buffer appliance (IME140) for cost-effective I/O acceleration, a next generation monitoring software (Insight), and the company’s declustered RAID solution (SFA Declustered RAID ‘DCR’) for increased data protection in massive storage pools. The company also announced recent HPC customer wins in some of largest HPCcenters.

“Modern HPC workflows require new levels of performance, flexibility and reliability to turn data and ideas into value,” said John Abbott, founder and research, VP, 451 Research. “With its long-standing HPC storage heritage, DDN is strongly positioned with closely integrated components that can deliver extreme I/O performance, comprehensive monitoring at scale and new levels of data protection.”

Solutions and next generation monitoring tools
HPC and data-intensive enterprise environments are facing new pressures that stem from higher application diversity and sophistication along with a steep growth in volume of active data sets.

These trends present a challenge to today’s filesystems in delivering the performance and economics to match business needs and compute capability. In addition, as rotational drive capacities grow the risk of data loss increases due to longer drive rebuild times. DDN’s latest technology delivers the enhanced performance, flexibility and management simplicity needed to solve these challenges and to accelerate large-scale workflows for operational efficiency and ROI.

• IME140 – The company has expanded its IME product line with the IME140 that makes IME scale-out flash accessible to more organisations at lower cost. It supports file performance in a small 1U flash data appliance. Each appliance can deliver more than 11GB/s write and 20GB/s read throughputs and more than one million file IO/s (read and write). Starting with a resilient solution with four units, the IME140 allows organisations to cost-effectively scale performance independent of amount of capacity required. Traditional parallel file systems often cannot keep pace with the mixed I/O requirements of modern workloads and fail to deliver the potential of flash. The IME software implements a faster, leaner data path which delivers to applications the low-latencies and high throughputs of NVMe. The IME140 1U building block allows organisations to intelligently apply fast flash where it is needed, while maintaining cost-effective capacity on HDD within the file system.

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• Insight – The Insight is the firm’s next-generation monitoring software. Easy to deploy, it allows customers to monitor the most challenging environments at scale, across multiple file systems and storage appliances. With Insight customers can identify and address hot spots, bottlenecks and misbehaving applications. Integrated with SFA, EXAScaler, GRIDScaler and IME, Insight delivers a way for customers to monitor their complete DDN-based ecosystem.

• SFA Declustered RAID (SFA DCR) – The growth of drive capacities, as exemplified by the recently released 12TB near line SAS drive, has exposed the limitations and inflexibility of traditional RAID configurations. Since traditional RAID pools are constrained to a small drive count, rebuild times can become long due to the limited spindles supporting the rebuild operation. This limitation exposes storage systems to long periods of performance degradation during rebuilds and higher potential data loss due to multiple simultaneous disk failures. The SFA systems have mitigated these limitations using an overprovisioned backend and optimised rebuild algorithms. The SFA Declustered RAID (DCR) goes a step further and removes the constraint of a small, fixed drive count RAID pools and allows data and parity information to be distributed among a much larger, user configurable, number of disks. Offered on SFA14KX, DCR improves data resilience and provides faster rebuild times, higher IO/s performance, larger virtual drives, and increased storage efficiency, among other benefits.

Availability:

• The DDN IME140 will ship in volume in 1Q18.

• The SFA DCR is shipping with the SFA14KX, and DDN Insight monitoring software is integrated and shipping with SFA, EXAScaler, GRIDScaler and IME solutions.

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HPC customer wins:
Deployed in thousands of HPC and mission critical environments worldwide, the company’s solutions have been designed, engineered and proven in the world’s most scalable data centers.

New customers include:

• The Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information (KISTI). As one of Korea’s top R&D institutes in science and technology infrastructure, KISTI is the only such institute that operates a large-scale supercomputer for public use. KISTI’s fourth-generation supercomputer, KISTI-4, installed in 2008, had reached its maximum capacity and was experiencing a shortage of computing resources, escalating TCO and declining efficiency. In early 2018, it will replace KISTI-4 with a KISTI-5 supercomputing system to meet its increasing computing resource needs and to provide computing infrastructure for HPC, machine learning, big data analysis, high throughput computing and cloud services. KISTI is currently utilising DDN Lustre with two SFA12K appliances and an SFA7700 for the KISTI-4 supercomputer, and recently selected the company’s HPC storage, including forty IME240, eleven ES14KX and two SFA7700X appliances, for its KISTI-5 supercomputer.

• National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST). As one of the largest public research organisations in Japan, AIST focuses on the creation and practical realisation of technologies useful to Japanese industry and society. AIST bridges the gap between innovative technological seeds and commercialisation. With an emphasis on AI, AIST needed a storage solution that delivered performance, stability, cost-effectiveness and scalability. The company assisted AIST in designing a system utilising a 22PB GRIDScaler with SFA14KX and 600TBs of SSD.