System Fabric Works Announces SystemFabricStor

A small business based in Austin, TX, System Fabric Works (SFW) announces the availability of a range of custom integratable storage targets based on commodity Intel 5500 Xeon processors, high speed SAS drives, iWARP interfaces and InfiniBand. These targets include a selection of RDMA application services for SAN or NAS file systems, parallel file systems such as Lustre and Storage Servers for Oracle RAC.

  
The SSA-16 Appliance

At SC09, System Fabric Works will be part of a integrated system that includes a FabricStor appliance. The FabricStor in this system, running on a 10GbE iWARP Data Fabric, functions as a high speed recording device and enables journaling for the high performance messaging technologies. The SSA-16 appliance is a cost effective, carefully configured commodity storage target using the SAN RDMA target protocol (SRP) from open source OFED. This appliance provides the ability to store data in real time with little or no impact on application latency when compared to current memory resident techniques. This adds a new, critical capability of data recording to real time messaging for financial services applications.

“To meet tomorrow’s DOD/IC environment of high volume sensor data creating extremely large data repositories we have been able to meet our customer’s requirements within their budgets”, said Keith Fishbach, President of Padova Technologies, Columbia, Maryland. “We have been extremely pleased that SFW has delivered a range of FabricStor systems integrated and configured to meet our customer’s needs. The systems have performed flawless in highly demanding volume-intensive sensor applications where real-time data recording is critical for gathering the necessary observations for our nation’s security.”

“This iWARP version of FabricStor, along with other versions we have shipped to customers, validates the custom integration, RDMA efficiency and real time performance we are able to deliver with today’s Intel 5500 chipsets”, said Bob Pearson, Founder CTO and CEO of System Fabric Works. “Added to this, internal use of PCIe Gen 2, carefully tuned RAID controllers and high speed SAS drives enables us to configure FabricStors to deliver up to wire speed performance on all of today’s high speed fabrics and networks, e.g. up to 1 Gigabyte per second on 10 Gigabit Ethernet”.

SystemFabricStor configurations are selectable at order time in three or five rack-unit enclosures including 16 or 24 disk drives, a single or dual socket Intel 5500 server motherboard, multiple PCIe-2 RAID controllers and network adapters at speeds ranging from 10 to 40 Gigabits per second for either fiber or copper media.

With such varied customization and configuration options, performance will vary widely independent of application characteristics, disk subsystem access patterns, data bock sizes and layouts. Performance measurement and documentation of customer specific configurations is just one of the services for the SystemFabricStor offered by SFW.

To better understand the performance potential of the SSA-16, consider these results: A SRP target consisting of 16 SAS disks (15K rpm), 2 RAID controllers, a single socket Intel 5500 and a 40 gigabit fabric adapter, yields 2.4 Gigabytes (20 gigabits) per second on reads and 1.8 Gigabytes per second on writes. To achieve this performance, a large block serial access pattern, similar to many data streaming applications, was applied to this configuration.

SFW integrates the OpenFabrics-based target software for the RDMA Application Service that customers select ranging from SRP and iSER for block data, NFS or Lustre for file oriented data, and RDS for sockets based data movement on the network. For ease of installation, self testing and operation, SFW supplies a system and data management GUI. Today FabricStor provides low cost per megabyte data storage and moves it over a network at multiple Gigabytes per second. Multiple FabricStors enable data storage architectures that both scale to build petabyte sized file systems and provide high availability capability through the use of redundancy options.