Raid Inc. Signed OEM Agreement With Big Blue

RAID Incorporated signed an OEM agreement with IBM Corp. to integrate the IBM General Parallel File System (GPFS) with RAID’s end-to-end high-performance computing and technology solutions. Through this agreement, RAID clients will gain access to the most advanced parallel file system in the industry.

GPFS is a high-performance, scalable clustered file system developed by IBM that provides reliable, concurrent high-speed file access to applications running on multiple nodes of clusters. In addition, GPFS greatly simplifies cluster file system administration and includes tools capable of managing petabytes of data and billions of files.

"GPFS was invented by IBM Research more than a decade ago and, thanks to continuous investment, now forms the basis for some of IBM’s most innovative high performance and storage solutions," said Dave Jursik, vice president of Deep Computing for IBM. "Through this agreement with RAID and others like it, GPFS is becoming widely available and adopted across the industry."

GPFS currently powers many of the world’s largest scientific supercomputers, including many of the supercomputers that populate the Top 500 List of the most powerful supercomputers on the planet, and commercial applications requiring high-speed access to large volumes of data such as digital media, engineering design, business intelligence, financial analytics, seismic data processing, geographic information systems, and scalable file serving.

GPFS can be used with AIX, Linux and Microsoft Windows Server-based clusters or a heterogeneous cluster of AIX, Linux and/or Windows Server nodes. It is the most mature parallel file system for Windows platforms.

RAID Inc. is shipping GPFS version 3.3 today, along with their Xanadu line of enterprise-class HPC storage solutions and patent-pending StorageWatch remote management and monitoring service.

"The ability to integrate GPFS with our customized HPC solutions provides RAID with much more flexibility and provides us with a very complete portfolio of parallel file system options," stated Dr. Ercan Kamber, Director of HPC Engineering at RAID. "IBM’s commitment to GPFS and support for multiple storage platforms provides RAID customers access to a robust, well supported parallel file system."