DDN Into Entry-Level Lustre Appliance for HPC: ES7K

DataDirect Networks, Inc. (DDN) has unveiled its entry-level Lustre storage appliance at the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC).

EXAScaler 7000

As a founding member of OpenSFS, DDN was the first storage vendor to support Lustre and sells and supports more Lustre environments than any other storage vendor in the world. Expanding on this experience, the EXAScaler 7000 (ES7K) leverages Lustre 2.5 pre-installed and optimized for company’s high-density storage appliances. It delivers enterprise features including simple management and monitoring interfaces, and HPC-level performance that optimizes both mixed and parallel I/O performance.

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ES7K delivers reliability and support combined with open source innovations to deliver  fast and high-density Lustre appliance. Built specifically for organizations with data-intensive, high-performance storage requirements, the ES7K provides a simple, cost-effective way to leverage the benefits of DDN’s high-performance storage architecture with open-source Lustre file systems.

As with all the EXAScaler appliances, the ES7K offers company’s developed Lustre features that are backed by Intel support. Simple to install, configure and manage, the ES7K scales out to deliver massive storage performance density with a broad feature set and the flexibility of open source.

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ES7K advantages over competitive alternativesinclude:

• 3x faster performance: Maximizes ROI by delivering performance per rack unit for HPC applications.

• More than 2x storage density: Starts at tens of terabytes and scales to nearly a petabyte of capacity by leveraging the highest density per rack unit for optimal efficiency.

• Lowest TCO: Starts with the smallest configuration and scales non-disruptively with additional ES7K building blocks.

• Simplest deployment and management: Configuration and deployment optimization features, integration with drive-to-file system monitoring, and metadata convergence options make the ES7K the ideal platform for migrating an application or an entire workflow to Lustre.

“DDN is a strong member of the Lustre community and is valued for its contributions in the areas of performance and management of Lustre-based storage systems. With years of experience in designing, installing and supporting Lustre-based storage, DDN offers a high performing appliance built on Intel Enterprise Edition for Lustre leveraging Lustre 2.5,” said Brent Gorda, GM, high performance data division, Intel Corp. “Lustre’s momentum in the market is strong and accelerating. In the high performance technical computing arena, Lustre has been widely embraced by national labs and universities, and now we are seeing traditional industries like research, oil and gas, manufacturing, and financial services actively adopt Lustre. Intel is excited to see DDN expand its Lustre offering with the new ES7K appliance, and we look forward to continuing our strong collaboration in the area of performance-driven solutions.“

“DDN is the primary storage vendor for some of the highest-scaling, most performance-critical HPC installations in the scientific and commercial markets. Now DDN has used that expertise to create an entry-level Lustre appliance aimed at making it easy and affordable for more organizations to migrate to parallel file systems,” said Steve Conway, research VP, HPC and data analysis, IDC. “The new ES7K appliance should appeal to users with simulation workloads and to the growing contingent of commercial firms turning to HPC for advanced analytics.“

The ES7K is scheduled for availability in the third quarter of 2015.

New European customers
Along with the introduction of the ES7K, DDN announced three new European HPC users who have selected company’s solutions to deploy a Lustre solution for the most efficient, highest-performance acceleration of their workloads: Cyfronet, Public Health England, and Wroclaw Centre for Networking and Supercomputing.

Cyfronet, academic computer centre in Poland that is home to Prometheus, the most powerful supercomputer in the history of Poland, relies on company’s Lustre appliances to accelerate and optimize its big data workflows.

Public Health England (PHE) is pioneering a next-generation, centralized sequencing service to generate and analyze the near-complete genetic code of pathogenic bacteria and viruses. By storing its generated data on company’s cloud and big storage systems, PHE is able to accelerate its sequencing service time to results from days to hours and improve public safety intervention.

The Wroclaw Centre for Networking and Supercomputing employs EXAScaler appliance to support vital research such as the Prognocean project + service, which produces real-time predictions of sea level change with lead times up to three months.

“With our DDN-powered solution, we are able to leverage DDN’s extensive Lustre 2.5 experience, and industry-leading storage performance and density to reduce computation time while offering 6x greater capacity for storing complex scientific models,” said Pawel Dziekonski, senior IT specialist, HPC department, Wroclaw Centre for Networking and Supercomputing. “Simple to install and manage, our DDN storage system provides consistently high performance across our mixed workload environment, has improved collaboration with research scientists and is expediting time to results.“