DDN Unveiled SFA12K Series of Big Data Appliances With Storage and Processing ...

DataDirect Networks, Inc. (DDN) unveiled the SFA12K series of Big Data appliances, a suite of products designed to accelerate data-intensive applications and consolidate infrastructure to minimize total cost of data storage ownership for Big Data, high-performance computing, cloud, and content-intensive environments.

"The exponential growth of Big Data is putting significant strain on IT infrastructures and challenging organizations’ ability to successfully ingest, store, process and distribute data," said Alex Bouzari, CEO and co-founder, DataDirect Networks. "With the SFA12K series’ groundbreaking ability to virtualize applications and store and process within the same appliance, we are delivering ideal storage and compute infrastructure solutions for organizations worldwide."

DDN is introducing three new models
of its Storage Fusion Architecture:

The SFA12K-40 delivers the highest single-platform performance, at over 40GB/s and 1.4 Million Flash IOPS. With IB and FC connectivity, the system is designed to scale file storage systems to 1TB/s and beyond with as little as 25 arrays – enabling consolidation as much as 8:1 as opposed to competing technology such as that from NetApp
Featuring optimized virtualization and x86 co-processing, the SFA12K-20E extends DDN’s In-Storage Processing offering, first announced in 2009, to host DDN’s ExaScaler and GridScaler parallel file systems and/or customer applications natively within the storage array. With 40GbE and IB connectivity, each SFA12K-20E delivers 20GB/s of bandwidth and 700K Flash IOPS while also driving down data access latency and eliminating the cost and complexity of external computing and storage networking for virtualized Windows and Linux applications
The SFA12K-20 combines storage performance with a cost-optimized system configuration to deliver over 20GB/s and 700K Flash IOPS
from a single system.

"DDN is a laser-focused company that invests in IP to drive the best possible performance," said Dave Vellante, President and CEO of Wikibon.org. "Features such as In-Storage Processing, Real-Time I/O and a unique storage fabric allow processing to be pushed closer to the data and raises the bar on the competition. With these innovations, DDN is signaling to customers that it’s time to reconsider the status quo. Importantly, this announcement plays into a broader information systems agenda by establishing a baseline platform that can scale and respond to big, fast data requirements."

Each new appliance is powered by DDN’s new StorageScaler 8460 (SS8460) density storage enclosure. Capable of housing up to 84 3.5" and 2.5" SATA, SAS and SSD devices in 4U of rack space, this offering reduces data center sprawl by up to 40% as compared to even the highest density storage array offerings and requires 58% less space efficient than competing scale-out file storage offerings.

"Our multi-disciplinary research agenda presents our computation and storage resources with a demanding and unpredictable workload," said Professor Dr. Arndt Bode, chairman of the board of directors of the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre in Munich, Germany. "The LRZ has selected IBM and DDN to deliver a new SFA12K-based system to power a 15PB, multi-100GB/s storage environment that answers the multi-discipline challenge and will support the needs of, SuperMUC, one of the world’s largest supercomputing systems."

In addition to performance, the SFA12K series of systems
feature a number of advancements, including:

Storage Fusion Fabric: DDN delivers storage access density and supports up to 160 dedicated 6GB SAS lanes and up to 500% greater storage access density than competing systems, aggregating and maximizing the performance of performance SSD devices to enable customers to avoid expensive PCIe-based approaches to flash-based application acceleration
QoS: With new versions of SFAOS, DDN will deliver real-time quality of service and predictable latency for read-intensive applications requiring sustained data access even during system component failure events
SATAssure+: DDN’s SATAssure+ capability enables the system to autonomously heal itself from errant SATA drive failures through intelligent fault and power management to reduce instances of SATA drive replacement by up to 80%
Systems management: The SFA12K will feature several new serviceability and usability features, including a scriptable API for simplified systems administration and monitoring.

SFA12K-40 on Display:
Live demonstrations of DDN’s SFA12K-40 and other award-winning DDN parallel file storage solutions will be on display at the world’s largest conference for high performance computing, SC11 in Seattle, WA, beginning on November 14. DDN SFA technology will also be on display at SC11 in the booths of DDN vendor and customer partners including Bull, HP, IBM, SGI and more.

Availability:
SFA12K systems will ship in the second quarter of 2012 and are available for pre-order.