Lenovo Distributed Storage Solution for IBM Spectrum Scale

From Lenovo Group Ltd.

Deploying solutions for technical computing, HPC or AI, analytics and cloud environments can place a significant burden on IT.

Lenovo Servers High Density Distributed Storage Solution Ibm Spectrum Scale Subseries Hero

With the Lenovo Distributed Storage Solution for IBM Spectrum Scale (DSS-G) clients can focus their efforts on maximizing user time instead of consuming valuable resources to design, optimize, install, and support the infrastructure required to meet user demands.

DSS-G is fulfilled through Lenovo Scalable Infrastructure (LeSI), leveraging decades of experience simplifying complex deployments for customers. With integrated, delivered, and fully-supported solutions that match best-industry components with optimized solution design, DSS-G provides scalable solutions that address the high-performance storage needs in the data center.

Powerful combination
DSS-G combines the performance of ThinkSystem servers and Lenovo disk enclosures with Spectrum Scale software to deliver a high-performance, scalable building-block approach to modern storage needs. Lenovo DSS-G supports 3 editions of IBM Spectrum Scale:

IBM Spectrum Scale Data Access Edition (DAE) provides base GPFS functions including Information Lifecycle Management (ILM), Active File Management (AFM), and Clustered NFS (CNFS) in Linux environments.
IBM Spectrum Scale Data Management Edition (DME) provides all the features of the Data Access Edition plus advanced features like asynchronous multi-site disaster recovery, native encryption support, Transparent Cloud Tiering.

Optimized design
DSS-G features ThinkSystem servers with AMD EPYC 9004 Series processors, Lenovo 24Gb SAS storage enclosures and drives, software, and networking components that allow for a wide choice of technology within an integrated solution, available in a pre-integrated rack or deployed in an existing customer rack.

Each solution is tested and optimized for reliability, interoperability, and maximum performance, so clients can quickly deploy the system and get to work achieving their business goals. With DSS-G high-storage density and I/O performance, you gain all the reliability, integration, and interoperability of a high-capacity Spectrum Scale-based storage architecture.

Increase results
Clients are expanding the use of technical computing and HPC/AI to solve complex problems. These environments need high-capacity storage with low-latency data access as well as quick rebuild times in the event of disk failure to maintain data integrity and system availability.

As an integral part of the Lenovo Scalable Infrastructure (LeSI) portfolio, the declustered RAID capability of Lenovo DSS-G provides performance, reliability, and data integrity, with rebuild times up to 8x faster than controller-based storage. DSS-G offers a modular building-block approach to Spectrum Scale with nearly linear performance and capacity scaling, while maintaining a global namespace that enables users to view everything as a single storage cluster. These features allow users to quickly put the system to work, and easily grow with new storage demands, and increase their overall productivity.

End-to-end support
The company’s DSS-G is built, tested, delivered, and supported as part of an overall LeSI deployment. You receive single point-of-contact, solution-level support that includes components to deliver maximum system availability throughout the life of the system. This enables you to spend less time deploying and maintaining systems and more time delivering results.

Lenovo DSS-G features:

Scalable building block approach to high-performance storage
Multiple configurations to optimize for capacity and performance
AMD EPYC 9004 Series processors
Lenovo D4390 high-density storage enclosures with 90x 12, 14, 16, 18, 20, 22TB NL SAS drives (3.5″ form factor)
Lenovo D1224 storage enclosures (2.5″ form factor) with 24x SSDs (400GB – 7.68TB)
Choice of 10GbE/25GbE/40GbE/100GbE/200GbE/400GbE, or HDR100, HDR, NDR200, NDR400 Latest Generation InfiniBand
Declustered RAID for sustained, predictable performance and rapid rebuilds
No hardware controllers – disk management and RAID performed by the Spectrum Scale RAID feature
Outstanding capacity and performance

DSS product overview
Distributed storage solution configurations for IBM Spectrum Scale
The following figure shows 2 of the configurations available, the G204 (2xSR655 V3 and 4xD1224) and the G260 (2xSR655 V3 and 6xD4390). See the model section for all available configurations.

DSS-G with ThinkSystem V3 is more than doubling the performance over the previous-gen and supports up to 25% more capacity in a single building block. It can be licensed by the number of drives installed or alternatively the usable capacity, rather than the number of processor cores or the number of connected clients, so there are no added licenses for other servers or clients that mount and work with the file system.

Distributed storage solution – Model examples
Lenovo DSS-G is available in the configurations listed in the following table. Each configuration is installed in a 42U rack, although multiple DSS-G configurations can share the same rack.

Naming convention: The 3 numbers in the Gxyz configuration number represent the following:

x = Number of servers (SR655)
y = Number of D4390 drive enclosures
z = Number of D1224 drive enclosures