Cray Hired Majority of SystemFabricWorks’ Employees

Cray Inc., in large-scale parallel storage systems for HPC, has strengthened its storage and data management team with the addition of key individuals from SystemFabricWorks (SFW), in storage interconnect solutions and software.

Through an agreement with SFW, Cray has hired the majority of SFW’s employees.

Among the SFW employees now working at Cray are   Robert (Bob) Pearson, the former CEO of SFW, and  Bill Boas, previously the VP of business development for SFW and a co-founder of the Open Fabric Alliance.

A number of engineers from SFW have also joined Cray’s storage and data management team, enhancing Cray’s expertise in Lustre-based storage solutions. SFW is continuing its operations with a new management team.

"Expanding our team with some of the top storage and IB engineering experts is an important step in continuing to drive Cray’s growth in the storage market," said Barry Bolding, Cray’s VP of storage and data management. "Our expanding base of HPC storage customers have demanding integration and deployment requirements and are looking for vendors like Cray that have experience in both storage and storage interconnects such as IB. At Cray, we are creating a storage team with the design expertise and best practices that are critical to the performance, management and scalability of parallel storage systems over time."

Bolding added: "This announcement is another positive milestone in a recent string of new customer announcements for our scale-out Sonexion storage system, as well as our portfolio of storage offerings from partners such as Data Direct Networks and NetApp. It’s an exciting time for our team and we’re looking forward to the future."

To date, Cray has shipped more than 50PB of storage capacity in 2012, and has delivered Cray Sonexion storage systems to customers in the energy, government and academic market segments. As part of the Blue Waters supercomputer at the University of Illinois’ National Center for Supercomputing Applications, Cray recently installed a 36-cabinet, 25PB Sonexion storage system capable of delivering more than one terabyte-per-second of I/O bandwidth performance to more than 25,000 compute nodes.

In June, Cray announced it will deliver a next-generation Sonexion storage system to the Department of Energy’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) that will scale to more than 6PB of usable storage and more than 140GB/s of sustained aggregate IO performance. A number of other HPC centers around the world have already signed contracts for Sonexion storage systems, including the Pawsey Centre in Perth, Australia, and the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) in Lugano, Switzerland.

The Cray Sonexion storage system is an integrated Cray-supported scale-out Lustre storage system for HPC. The system’s modular, compact design keeps costs low and provides precision scalability for HPC clusters and applications of all types.