Cray Expands in HPC Storage Market

Cray Inc. announced the latest addition to its line of HPC products with the launch of the Sonexion 1300 system, an integrated file system, software and storage product.

The introduction of the Sonexion 1300 system extends Cray’s presence in the storage solutions business and gives the company the ability to offer its customers a scalable Lustre file system.

Designed specifically for a range of HPC workloads, the Sonexion 1300 system cost-effectively scales from approximately 50 terabytes to more than 50 petabytes of useable capacity without a compromise in performance. The storage system also features data rates of more than a terabyte-per-second.

With an increasing market demand for larger, faster and more productive HPC storage systems, the differentiator in the Sonexion 1300 system is that the storage product is designed to provide users with an integrated, scalable Lustre solution. New storage system combines powerful servers, the latest Lustre parallel file system and management software into a modular storage product that is built, thoroughly tested, shipped and supported as a complete solution.

The Cray Sonexion 1300 storage system will be a part of the recently announced Blue Waters supercomputer at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois, and will provide more than one terabyte-per-second of aggregate bandwidth when fully installed in one of the largest capacity storage subsystems in the world.

"After a thorough evaluation of the Cray Sonexion integrated storage product, we selected the Lustre-based solution to be an integral part of the Blue Waters system," said Bill Kramer of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois. "The Cray Sonexion installation at NCSA will provide more than a terabyte-per-second of sustained IO performance for scientific applications. Cray’s system is designed from the ground-up with Lustre in mind, and brings further innovations that include factory testing and installation of Lustre, full redundancy, integrated servers, SSD for journaling and excellent upgradeability features. We are confident that with the combination of Cray’s experience in scalable storage and tight Lustre integration, this will be one of the most productive file systems for sustained science applications performance."

The Sonexion 1300 system leverages Cray’s experience with Lustre parallel file systems. Cray has delivered some of the highest performance and most productive file systems in the HPC market, including Lustre-based solutions to customers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, the Air Force Research Laboratory, the University of Stuttgart’s High Performance Computing Center (HLRS), and the Korea Meteorological Administration. Cray is also a founding member of OpenSFS, a technical, community-based organization that is focused on high-end, open-source file system technologies and is committed to ensuring the ongoing success of Lustre.

"More and more of our customers have expressed a need for increased performance, reliability and manageability from storage systems that can be shared with their highest performance, mission critical systems in their datacenter," said Barry Bolding, Cray’s vice president of storage and data management. "As a result, we decided to provide a storage product with a scale-out architecture, which is purpose-designed and built to run Lustre, but employs a testing discipline and set of integrated management tools that exceeds other available solutions. The Cray Sonexion 1300 storage solution greatly improves the user experience with shared, scalable Lustre file systems – both large and small."

Bolding added: "We see this as an exciting time for the Lustre community in terms of performance, functionality and support. With the introduction of the Cray Sonexion storage system, we can now deliver a storage solution that meets the real-world demands of production file systems for the petascale era."

Available at prices starting at less than $250,000, the Sonexion 1300 system is upgradeable as customers’ storage and performance needs increase over time.

Sonexion systems are built from three major components:

• high performance Scalable Storage Units,
• Metadata Management Unit, and
• network-ready cabinets that include InfiniBand switch connectivity

Customers’ varying requirements for capacity and bandwidth can be met and upgraded on-the-fly. The Sonexion 1300 system is shipped as an integrated solution with all management and Lustre software installed, and Cray will provide support and services for Sonexion systems. Cray will support Sonexion 1300 systems for clients on both Cray and non-Cray compute systems.