ISC: DDN EXA5 for HPC, Big Data and AI Acceleration, Multi-Cloud Data Management

DataDirect Networks, Inc. announced EXA5, the next gen of its EXAScaler Storage.

Expanding on firm’s-scale solutions, EXA5 provides deeper, more powerful integrations into AI and HPC ecosystems through simpler implementation and scaling models, easier visibility into workflows and powerful global data management features.

“We’ve built EXA5 directly for the new era of HPC and AI in the context of Multicloud. We are introducing an entirely new set of features aimed at today’s most demanding AI and HPC end-to-end requirements, at any scale.” said James Coomer, SVP products, DDN. “EXA5 leads on performance, on prem and in the cloud, with unmatched capabilities in security, stability, user and data management.”

EXA5 allows for scaling either with all NVMe flash or with a hybrid approach, offering flexible scaling according to needs with the performance of flash or the economics of HDDs.

Compatible with DDN’s A³I storage solutions, which are factory pre-configured and optimized for AI, deployment is made easy while reducing deployment time for an AI-ready data center. Together they provide benchmarking, documentation and qualification with AI and GPU environments.

“With the goal of expanding the boundaries of science as we know it today, we are excited about the arrival of advanced new technology that can dramatically increase the performance at scale of our systems, and specifically of our new Top 10 supercomputer, Frontera,” said Dan Stanzione, executive director, Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC). “DDN’s new EXA5 has the power to provide the best I/O performance our users have ever experienced, and greatly reduce the I/O bottlenecks in large scale computation. We believe that EXA5 will play a role in many of the groundbreaking discoveries scientists will make with Frontera.”

EXA5 features and capabilities include:

• STRATAGEM – As company’s integrated policy engine, it enables platforms for transparent flash tiering for high performance and efficiency. Featuring built-in fast and efficient data management, users can manage most active data to scale-out flash tiers from scale-out HDD tiers. It also automatically controls free space on flash, quickly responding to changing demands and efficiently scanning storage devices directly to find target files.
• Expanded Integration With DDN Insight – With comprehensive monitoring for multi-solutions, Insight provides real-time visibility into software and appliances. Through real-time analysis, it derives the most value from storage infrastructures and sorts running jobs by metadata activity and throughput operations. With easy identification of problem jobs, it can quickly resolve performance issues. It is also scalable, allowing for open back-end database and integration with other systems and switches to cope with millions of stats per second.
• Gateway – With a NAS type interface, non-native DDN Lustre users can export filesystems through firm’s CIFS and NFS gateways. Providing another avenue to get access to high performance data, the solution can scale horizontally as needed to maintain consistency and lock semantics with Linux/Unix and Windows systems.
• Flexible Small File Acceleration – Complementary to granular metadata scaling, EXA5 opens the ability to scale across EXAScaler servers, allowing for efficient application of flash to small files. It also expands the domain of file sizes from a few kilobytes to multiple megabytes.
• Data Protection – EXA5 includes integrated end-to-end data protection using T10PI/DIX standard. With transparent applications, users are supported by EXAScaler through drives, resulting in minimal performance impact.
• Security – Additional security measures including KMIP and FIPS support plus EXA5 auditing capabilities and multi-tenancy.