SC19: AIC and Extend ib Partnership

AIC, Inc. and VC funded  Exten Technologies, Inc. have partnered to provide a dense and scalable, software-defined NVMe-oF solution with  performance, management, provisioning, and RAID data protection services.

This disaggregated storage based on the AIC Shark server provides price-performance for HPC, analytics, and ML/AI applications.

The Shark server is for dense computation, networking, and storage scalability. Four AMD EPYC processors manage storage processing for up to 24 local NVMe drives in its 2U enclosure. It’s a scale-up (add JBOFs) and scale-out (add servers) platform for high-bandwidth shared storage applications that have a variety of data processing requirements.

The Exten HyperDynamic datapath running on Shark nodes creates a data processing system with less than 1μs of software overhead. This enables  performance with the low latency. With simple striping, the 2U system achieves bandwidth of over 80GB/s. it supports RDMA and TCP in parallel for flexibility.

Exten architecture

“Pooled NVMe storage is the most cost-effective solution for data-hungry HPC applications,” said Craig Gilmore, CEO, Exten.  “Exten HyperDynamic software leads the market in ease-of-use and enables resilient storage with performance density previously only available with expensive proprietary solutions.”

The HyperDynamic software management suite offers a single REST interface to manage a cluster of NVMe-oF targets. This allows administrators to provision and manage the Shark with the simplicity of a single machine while maintaining the shared-nothing, linear scalability of NVMe-oF block storage performance. The Exten management framework is standards-based which ensures future-proof compatibility. Together, software and the Shark provide a framework for implementing any reconfigurable, software-defined NVMe-oF solution.

“Advances in supercomputing are pushing the boundaries of storage price performance,”said Michael Liang, CEO, AIC. “AIC is pleased to partner with Exten and AMD to deliver high performance production-ready storage for supercomputing at a price point well below that of traditional storage solutions.“

Utilizing standard MPIO and Linux drivers, the Shark solution provides a storage platform built on standard tools that provide fault tolerance at both the target and drive level. Exten software ensures resilience features including mirroring and dual parity RAID within each Shark node and volume replication across nodes without using client-side resources such as CPU, memory and I/O bandwidth.

Storage Disaggregation
The Shark, with HyperDynamic software installed, provides storage that is disaggregated from compute resources. This arrangement allows storage and compute to scale independently with no performance sacrifice. the storage software allows datacenter architects to select multiple hardware platforms and fabrics while maintaining a consistent user experience and high datapath performance.