NEC Selects Promise RAID Systems

PROMISE Technology, Inc. has been selected by NEC’s High-Performance Computing Group Europe (NEC HPCE) to supplement NEC’s parallel file system concept, LXFS. The first installations have been deployed in major German universities, a leading science centre in France and several leading European automotive company’s R&D facilities. PROMISE showed these case studies at CeBIT 2010.
 
“PROMISE RAID systems are the perfect supplement to NEC’s parallel file system concept LXFS for HPC,” said Dr. Andreas Findling, Senior Product Line Manager, NEC Deutschland GmbH. "NEC has a strong history of working closely with PROMISE to provide leading RAID solutions that continually exceed our customer’s expectations for ease of use, reliability, robustness and performance.”  Findling continued, “Data centre demands for higher computing power, networking bandwidth and support for virtualisation applications are driving system requirements for improved host bus interface and RAID performance. The PROMISE RAID controller card, with 6Gb/s SAS and PCIe 2.0 is a key part of how NEC is meeting these demands.”
 
The NEC LXFS/PROMISE solution is already deployed at a leading French science centre; the first PetaByte capacity project being fully completed. This solution is a RAID 5 configuration with SAS cascading of VTrak E-Class systems – the features of which made this such a compelling and intriguing project implementation for the centre.
 
The joint solution has also been deployed at several major German universities gaining them the same functionalities as found within the other installations. The universities have already reaped the benefits of this joint solution deployment including the flexibility to respond to customer needs, increased ease-of-expansion, the performance benefits of the speed of the SAS interfaces, as well as reduced TCO (total cost of ownership).
 
A major European automotive customer deploys hundreds of compute nodes based on AMD and Intel quad-core processors connected into an InfiniBand fabric. Each of the installations manages close to 400TB of data. One metadata block and three Object Store Blocks with 36 TB capacities are attached to an existing Infiniband Fabric. At the core of the Object Store blocks are RAID systems delivered by PROMISE Technology’s VTrak Series E310s each deploying SAS or SATA drives, being wireless and fully redundant. Each RAID system features two RAID controllers in an active-active configuration, further increasing availability. NEC selected PROMISE RAID systems in a RAID 6 configuration because of their proven success for NEC LXFS.
 
“Working with a well-known company like NEC allows us to offer customers reliable turnkey systems and help them to extract maximum benefit from their technology products,” said Albrecht Hestermann, Marketing Director, PROMISE Europe. “Our goal is always to enable our partners and customers to be as efficient and effective with their technology solutions as possible.”
 
NEC developed the parallel file system to offer huge storage capacities especially for mid- and large-scale HPC-systems. NEC LXFS consists of one Metadata Block and at least one Object Store Block. The servers in both blocks are bound together in a failover configuration and are able to cope with failures of hardware components. All components have multi-layer redundancies at the software and the hardware level. The Metadata Block is responsible for metadata services and it also takes the management role of the file server cluster. The Object Store Block is the basic element of the scalability provided by NEC‘s approach. The integrated file servers in active-active failover configuration manage multiple Object Storage Targets. The bandwidth, as well as capacity, of the parallel filesystem scales with the number of Object Store Blocks. Each OSB provides to 128 Terabyte capacity using VTrak SAS RAID storage systems, extended by VTrak JBOD systems using RAID 6 in a dual, fully redundant system configuration.
 
NEC has been the leader of providing high performance computing (HPC) solutions for decades. Their HPC hardware platforms range from server clusters to the most powerful vector systems, providing a total integrate HPC solution that take the complexity out of planning and deployment. Data center demands for higher computing power, networking bandwidth and support for virtualisation applications are driving system requirements for improved host bus interface and RAID performance. The Promise RAID controller card, with 6Gb/s SAS and PCIe 2.0 enabled by PMC-Sierra’s SRC 8x6G, is a key part of how NEC is meeting these demands.