DDN Improved Performance in STAC-M3 Benchmark Using A3I AI400X2 Appliance

DDN (DataDirect Networks, Inc.) announced improved performance in the STAC-M3 Benchmark utilizing its newly announced A³I AI400X2 appliance.

Financial services firms looking to accelerate analytics can create more sophisticated trading models with this new platform.

These benchmark results, audited by STAC Research, show a single company’s appliance delivering performance and throughput using a shared filesystem. While A³I storage systems can scale without limit to increase capacity and throughput, these results demonstrate performance in a cost-effective form factor. And the appliance has a smaller footprint, less complexity and lower overall TCO than competitive storage solutions.

The STAC-M3 is the financial services industry’s standard benchmark test suite for tick analytics. These benchmark specs are maintained by the STAC Benchmark Council, which consists of over 450 financial institutions and vendor organizations, whose purpose is to discuss technical challenges and solutions in financial services and develop technology benchmark standards that are useful to financial organizations. Many participating firms inform important technology decisions with STAC-M3 results, including the largest global banks, brokerage houses, exchanges, hedge funds, and proprietary trading shops.

A³I AI400X2 all-flash NVMe appliance

The benchmark test was performed on a single firm’s  A³I AI400X2 all-flash NVMe appliance connected to 15 servers running the KX Systems kdb+4.0 database in distributed mode via a high-speed IB switch. ⁽¹⁾ After completing its previous STAC benchmark tests in September 2020, ⁽²⁾ the company has since released the AI400X2 appliance and the underlying file system, EXAScaler 6, both of which were utilized in this year’s tests. With these improvements, the company was able to reduce the number of appliances in the test, while still exceeding 10 of 17 baseline (Antuco) benchmark tests and 19 of 24 scaling (Kanaga) benchmarks, compared to the previous tests using two firm’s AI400X appliances.

“Simplifying the management of data-intensive workloads and delivering faster insights to our customers is the basis of our development here at DDN,” said Kurt Kuckein, VP, marketing,. “These STAC benchmark results reflect the progress we’ve made toward streamlining data management while accelerating analytics and AI workloads – particularly for our financial services customers.“

Notable DDN results from STAC testing:

• DDN outperformed a solution using kdb+ 4.0, 3 NFS-based network-attached flash storage systems and 9 database servers ⁽³⁾
  (DDN was faster in 11 of 17 mean response time Antuco benchmarks, including a 11.4x speedup in single-user intervalized statistics, STAC-M3.β1.1T.STAT-UI.TIME)

• Also outperformed a solution using kdb+ 4.0, a parallel file system, 15 database servers, and 40 storage servers on a public cloud ⁽⁴⁾
  (12 of 17 Antuco benchmarks, and 12 of 24 Kanaga benchmarks, including a 16.2x to 19.9x speedup in the four 10-user market snapshots, STAC-M3.β1.10T.YR{2,3,4,5}-MKTSNAP.TIME)

Like many of the company’s enterprise customers, financial services firms are looking to modernize their business models with analytics and AI to generate new opportunities from their data. Existing approaches to data management using NFS-based configurations are often complex and inefficient, blocking the path to value because they do not scale to the size of the challenges. A³I solutions simplify data management for computing applications and give enterprise IT a platform for delivering high performance data services without compromise – for every workload and every user.

⁽¹⁾ STAC Report: DDN’s AI400X2 and EXAScaler 6.0 under STAC-M3 (tick analytics) (registration required)
⁽²⁾ STAC Report: kdb+ 3.6 with DDN EXAScaler & AI400X Flash appliances under STAC-M3 (tick analytics) (registration required)
⁽³⁾ STAC Report: kdb+ 4.0 on 9 x Dell EMC PowerEdge R640 servers accessing a Dell EMC PowerScale F900 All-Flash, 3-node cluster (tick analytics) (registration required)
⁽⁴⁾ STAC Report: kdb+ 4.0 on WekaFS and AWS under STAC-M3 (tick analytics) (registration required)

Resources:
STAC Solution Brief     
A3I, EXAScaler