Meteorological Organization in Italy Selects E4 and Xinnor

Consorzio LaMMA, a meteorological organization for Tuscany, Italy, has modernized its HPC storage infrastructure with a full flash storage solution from E4 Computer Engineering S.p.A., built on Xinnor’s xiRAID technology and BeeGFS parallel filesystem.

The implementation has delivered exceptional performance improvements while reducing power consumption and physical footprint.

The project addressed critical challenges faced by Consorzio LaMMA’s legacy HDD storage system, which consumed substantial power and space while experiencing reliability issues that threatened the organization’s mission-critical weather forecasting operations.

Full flash storage node, occupying just 2U of rack space, has achieved remarkable performance benchmarks:

• Sequential read speeds up to 62GB/s and write speeds up to 42GB/s locally
• Saturated 100Gb IB links at 11.5GB /s in multi-stream operations
• Over 125,000 IOs during random read operations
• 135,000 operations per second in metadata file stat tests

“This modernization represents a big step in our computational capabilities,” said Simone Montagnani , head, IT infrastructure, Consorzio LaMMA. “The seamless migration with zero downtime was crucial for our continuous meteorological operations. We can now process and analyze weather data with speed and reliability, directly enhancing our ability to provide accurate and timely forecasts to the people of Tuscany.“

One of the project’s most significant achievements was the complete data migration from the legacy storage system without any service interruption or data loss-a critical requirement for an organization providing essential weather forecasting services.

“The successful zero-downtime migration showcases the maturity and reliability of our Full Flash storage solutions,” said Davide Obbi, principal Engineer, E4 Computer Engineering. “By combining xiRAID’s robust data protection with BeeGFS’s parallel filesystem capabilities, we’ve delivered a solution that not only meets but exceeds Consorzio LaMMA’s performance requirements while maintaining the highest levels of data integrity and availability.“

The solution leverages Xinnor’s xiRAID Classic 4.2.0 to aggregate NVMe drives in RAID configurations, ensuring data protection without performance bottlenecks. BeeGFS 7.2.15 is mounted over xiRAID to enable fast, scalable, parallel access from multiple clients across Consorzio LaMMA’s 32-node HPC cluster.

“This deployment perfectly demonstrates xiRAID’s capability to unlock the potential of NVMe storage in demanding HPC environments,” said Davide Villa, CRO, Xinnor. “Our technology provides the robust foundation that allows organizations like Consorzio LaMMA to focus on their core mission-delivering critical weather forecasting services-while knowing their storage infrastructure can handle the most demanding computational workloads with complete reliability.“

Full Flash storage node features:

• Hardware: Supermicro 2125HS-TNR server with dual AMD EPYC 9124 16-Core processors
• Storage: 12×3.84TB Kioxia CM7-R RI NVMe drives in RAID6 plus 2×1.92TB drives in RAID-1
• Memory: 16xDDR5 4800 MT/s modules
• Software: AlmaLinux 8.10, Xinnor xiRAID Classic 4.2.0, BeeGFS 7.2.15

The implementation includes E4’s Argus monitoring solution, built on open-source technologies including Prometheus, Alert Manager, Grafana, and Grafana Loki. This provides real-time visibility into storage health and performance, with customizable alerts and consolidated log visualization.

Resource:
Case study: Consorzio LaMMA selects Full Flash Storage from E4, Based on Xinnor’s xiRAID and BeeGFS