ISC18: DDN Launches Solutions to Accelerate HPC Workloads and Enable AI-Ready Data Center

At ISC18, DataDirect Networks, Inc. (DDN) announced several HPC storage solutions and capabilities, which it will feature at the International Supercomputing event, ISC 2018, in Frankfurt, Germany.

SFA400NV

These solutions include two workload-accelerating, 100% NVMe storage appliances, the SFA200NV and SFA400NV, which are built to meet changing business demands; enhancements to DDN’s enterprise-ready Lustre file system solution, EXAScaler 4.0, which provides advanced capabilities on top of a scalable file system; and the firm’s next-generation scale-up, scale-out hybrid flash storage appliance, the SFA7990.

“The new offerings from DDN highlight the merger of new flash technologies and new high-performance workloads,” said Addison Snell, CEO, Intersect360 Research, Inc. “Moreover, DDN continues to show leadership with Lustre, the most used parallel file system in our latest survey of HPC environments.“

As AI and deep learning applications continue to proliferate and present the data center with new workloads, the company, with its history of solving intractable IO problems, is ready to assist with products to accelerate its customers’ lines of business.

“Many of DDN’s customers are entrenched in challenges they had not previously faced in the data center. We have always collaborated to help them solve their most demanding problems, but now we are taking it a step further,” said James Coomer, VP, product, DDN. “The new line of products is designed to efficiently address the needs of HPC customers, while simultaneously enabling newer AI and deep learning architectures.“

EXAScaler 4.0
The company has enhanced its EXAScaler line with the EXAScaler 4.0, an enterprise-ready Lustre file system solution providing capabilities for customers running technical and HPC workloads and customers supporting AI and deep learning environments. The firm has engineered the EXAScaler 4.0 to provide HA, reliability and serviceability capabilities.

In addition, customers can count on the company’s expertise to help them address the challenges of Exascale and big data analytics while minimizing costs through improved integration, monitoring and management. EXAScaler 4.0 offers increased metadata performance, integrated monitoring capabilities and enhanced security features that allow customers to implement and deploy parallel file systems in complex, secure environments. This solution also delivers simplified installation and deployment methods.

SFA200NV and SFA400NV
Following industry trends and requirements, the company has developed an entirely class of firm’s Storage Fusion Architecture appliances, the SFA200NV and the SFA400NV. At up to 40GB and 1.5 million IO/s, the 2U SFA NVMe all flash platforms provide a fast storage solution and can hold up to 24 NVMe SSDs in a minimum 2U form factor. Whether accelerating an analytics workload, reducing latencies for tough NoSQL databases, or handling a growing deep learning project, the company’s SFA NVMe platforms are cost-effective elements in solving challenging IO problems. The platforms are available as block storage devices or as integrated high-performance file appliances. EXAScaler and GRIDScaler file systems enable a storage ‘building block’ model to scale-out the parallel file name space with efficiency.

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SFA7990

The SFA7990 is a mid-range platform for storage consolidation. The SFA7990 hybrid flash storage platform is designed to grow with the needs of an organization’s accelerating business requirements and provides flexibility without compromise. Customers can start with as small as a few terabytes and grow to multi-petabyte capacity. This appliance can also be configured with embedded performance parallel file systems in an integrated package. SFA7990 EXAScaler and GRIDScaler solutions provide a modular approach to building a capable platforms for parallel file storage systems.

SFA7990
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