Seagate ClusterStor L300 for Lustre Aimed at HPC Market

Seagate Technology plc introduced ClusterStor L300, a version of its ClusterStor Lustre storage architecture.

The L300 integrates with company’s 3.5-inch ClusterStor HPC drive designed for the HPC market, establishing the company’s commitment to full HPC solutions.

The L300 delivers up to 112GB/s throughput per rack when integrated with ClusterStor HPC drives, a performance improvement of 77% compared to previous ClusterStor systems. This level of performance density per rack unit helps customers reduce data center space, power and cooling costs while simplifying management and equipment requirements. Additionally, the solution optimizes random and sequential I/O workloads across the entire storage cluster, improving workflow productivity.

The company is introducing its ClusterStor HPC drive, which can be integrated with the L300 for extra high-performing storage in big data environments. The drive alone supports up to 4TB in a single drive slot with sequential data rate of 300 MB/s. It produces 35% faster random performance than any other 3.5-inch drive, and is backed by a MTBF of two million hours, making it for the data ingest, access and reliability needs in tough HPC environments.

The L300 contains technology innovation that supports an ‘extreme mode’ with up to 448GB/s performance per rack in addition to superior small file performance. This specific configuration combines company’s latest flash memory technology with the L300 integrated storage solution for high productivity applications requiring the ultimate in performance QoS for the most demanding workload requirements. It supports the use of company’s solid state hybrid drives providing a value option for transparent small file performance acceleration. The L300 Lustre solution supports Object Storage Target disk pool management that enables the creation of discrete storage pools for each type of media from flash memory, ClusterStor HPC drives, hybrid drives and capacity drives as disk pools within the same file system. The disk pool management feature enables application consolidation within a single storage solution by providing the best performance QoS value per individual application/workload.

The L300 supports next-generation networks built for Exascale computing, including Intel’s Omni-Path and the Mellanox EDR 100Gb/s IB.

“The L300 exemplifies Seagate’s growing ,dership in HPC storage and embodies our multiple layers of innovation from the file system to the core storage media itself,” said Ken Claffey, VP and GM, HPC systems business, Seagate. “ClusterStor integrates the latest in big data technologies to deliver class-leading ingest speeds, massively scalable capacities to more than 100PB and the ability to handle a variety of mixed workloads.“

The French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) intends to use ClusterStor L300 for its next-generation supercomputer. A key component of its defense simulation program (DAM), the supercomputer will have a computation capacity of 25 petaflops and 20 times lower electricity consumption than its predecessor.

“The Seagate ClusterStor L300 storage solution provides the best performance efficiency helping CEA-DAM to achieve the best value while reducing floor tile space requirements and power consumption cost,” said Didier Juvin, director, simulation and HPC program, CEA-DAM. “Seagate’s successful track record of supporting Lustre file system storage solutions provides the confidence to meet our productivity critical storage goals.“

Seagate also partners with Cray, Inc. to help bring the fastest HPC storage file systems to life with the Cray Sonexion Scale-out Lustre storage system:

“Seagate has long been an important and valued partner for Cray,” said Ryan Waite, SVP, product, Cray. “We are excited about increased bandwidth offered by the new HPC drives and the Omni-Path support, and we are looking forward to integrating this new technology into our Sonexion product line.“

The ClusterStor family architecture is built on firm’s field-proven enterprise storage design and Lustre, an open source parallel file system typically used for high-performance computing. Combining superior performance with efficient scalability, the ClusterStor family includes ClusterStor L300, ClusterStor A200, ClusterStor G200, ClusterStor 9000, ClusterStor 1500, ClusterStor Secure Data Appliance and Hadoop Workflow Accelerator for ClusterStor’s architecture.

ClusterStor L300 will be available in calendar Q1 2016.