insideHPC » Storage

Video: Xyratex Update – ClusterStor

Rich Brueckner — Sun, 16 Jun 2013 14:11:32 +0000

In this video from the HPC Advisory Council European Conference 2013, Torben Kling-Petersen from Xyrtex presents: Xyratex Update – ClusterStor.

Download the slides (PDF).

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TACC to Deploy 20 Petabyte Global File System from DDN

Ralph — Sun, 16 Jun 2013 10:47:22 +0000

This week TACC announced it will deploy 20 Petabyte, scalable global file system (GFS) from DDN that will be accessible to all of TACC’s computing and visualization systems.

The rate of data growth during the last decade has been exponential,” said Tommy Minyard, TACC’s director of Advanced Computing Systems. “This new global file system will offer a very large storage pool for thousands of researchers to store persistent data and make it easier for them to perform their scientific research. They will be able to access data from any production system at TACC and use it for later analysis, further processing, or to continue to run their applications.”

The new GFS will provide more than 20 petabytes of storage capacity for scientific data, and will allow scientists to access their data rapidly through its aggregate bandwidth of greater than 100 gigabytes per second. By providing a massive storage capability with high-performance access from all of TACC’s production systems, the system will further diversify the resources available to researchers and eliminate the need for researchers to manage data across multiple systems. This will balance the storage available to all TACC systems and make migration between systems and upgrades to new ones more transparent.

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DDN Hosts User Group Meeting at ISC’13 June 17

Rich Brueckner — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 15:31:29 +0000

The annual DDN User Group meeting will be held on Monday, June 17 in conjunction with ISC’13.

DDN European User Group

Date: June 17, 2013
Time: 8:30am – 11:00am
Place: Congress Center Leipzig, Room M05

Speakers:

University College of London: Ms. Clare Gryce (Head of Research Computing) and Dr. Daniel Hanlon (Research Data Storage Architect)
CSC Finland: Pietari Hyvarinen (System Specialist)
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology – KIT: Jos van Wezel (Storage Group Leader)
DataDirect Networks: Mr. Dave Fellinger (Chief Scientist), Dr. James Coomer (Sr. Technical Advisor), and Mr. Jeff Denworth (VP of Marketing)

In related news, be sure to check out our feature story on the full spectrum of ISC’13 Ancillary Events.

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Podcast: Interview with DDN’s New President, Joe Cowan

Rich Brueckner — Wed, 05 Jun 2013 14:00:18 +0000

In this podcast, Jeff Denworth from DataDirect Networks introduces the company’s new President, Joe Cowan. As a former member of the DDN board, Cowan brings a wealth of experience in the enterprise, a space where DataDirect Networks hopes to grow with its Big Data solutions.

Read the Full Story * Download the MP3 * Subscribe on iTunes * Subscribe to RSS

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Video: Xyratex Launches ClusterStor Professional Services for Lustre

Rich Brueckner — Wed, 05 Jun 2013 11:00:03 +0000

In this video, Simon Johnson from Xyratex describes the company’s new suite of professional services for Lustre data storage.

Our mission for ClusterStor Professional Services is to accelerate the time to results for our users and partners across verticals and geographies, and help them realize value sooner from their investment in HPC storage technology,” said Simon Johnson, senior director of ClusterStor Professional Services at Xyratex. “Our team has a deep pedigree in value-added services, Lustre® file systems and data storage, and our ClusterStor solutions have achieved tremendous market adoption in a short time. Combined, this experience enables us to bring additional integrated solution value and efficiency to solve our clients’ challenges and further exploit the best-in-class performance that our technology delivers.”

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NCSA Taps 380 Petabyte High Performance Storage System

Rich Brueckner — Thu, 30 May 2013 19:44:24 +0000

Blue Waters' 380 petabyte High Performance Storage System (HPSS)

Today NCSA announced that its 380 Petabyte High Performance Storage System is now in full service production as part of the Blue Waters project. Described as the world’s largest automated near-line data repository for open science, the HPSS environment comprises multiple automated tape libraries, dozens of high-performance data movers, a large 40 Gigabit Ethernet network, hundreds of high-performance tape drives, and about a 100,000 tape cartridges.

This “big data” capacity is available to scientists and engineers using the sustained petascale Blue Waters supercomputer. The storage system can be easily expanded and extended to accommodate the extreme data needs of other science, engineering, or industry projects.

With the world’s largest HPSS now in production, Blue Waters truly is the most data-focused, data-intensive system available to the U.S. science and engineering community,” said Blue Waters deputy project director Bill Kramer.

The HPSS hierarchical file system software is designed to efficiently manage the access and storage of hundreds petabytes of data at high data rates. HPSS manages the life cycle of data by moving inactive data to tape and retrieving it the next time it is referenced. The highly scalable HPSS is the result of two decades of collaboration among five Department of Energy laboratories and IBM, with significant contributions by universities and other laboratories worldwide.

NCSA joined forces with the HPSS Collaboration’s Department of Energy labs and IBM to develop an HPSS capability for Redundant Arrays of Independent Tapes (RAIT)—tape technology similar to RAID for disk. RAIT dramatically reduces the total cost of ownership and energy use to store data without danger from single or dual points of failure through generated parity blocks. It also enhances the performance of data storage and retrieval since the data is stored and read/written in parallel.

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SCSI Express: Extending the SCSI Platform of Innovation

Rich Brueckner — Thu, 30 May 2013 11:00:02 +0000

In this slidecast, Marty Czekalski from the SCSI Trade Association presents: Extending the SCSI Platform of Innovation.

SCSI Express is the robust and proven SCSI protocol combined with PCIe that creates an industry-standard path to PCIe-based storage. SCSI Express combined with SAS-based solutions provides unprecedented performance and low latency that enterprises demand.

View the slides * Download the MP3 * Subscribe on iTunes* Subscribe to RSS

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Podcast: Radio Free HPC Looks at Holographic Storage

Rich Brueckner — Tue, 28 May 2013 20:12:21 +0000

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team takes a look at pending holographic storage technology.

Henry Newman’s head is still spinning from the technology previews he saw at the recent IEEE Mass Data Storage Conference. Could this be a game-changer for the tape industry and archiving data? What are the specs, limitations, and most importantly, are these the droids we’ve been looking for?

View the Hitachi Slides * View the Akonia Holographics Slides * Download the MP3 * Download the mobile video * Download 1024p Video * Subscribe on iTunes * RSS Feed

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University College London Simplifies Storage Management for Researchers with DDN

Ralph — Thu, 23 May 2013 17:13:55 +0000

Today DataDirect Networks announced that University College London has selected DDN technolgy to provide up to 3,000 researchers with a safe and resilient storage solution for sharing, reusing and preserving project-based research data.

In an effort to better support researchers, UCL sought to remove the burden of storing and preserving research data from individual users. They selected the combination of DDN’s distributed WOS and GRIDScaler technology to provide the desired scalability, performance, reliability, portability and management simplicity.

DDN is empowering us to deliver performance and cost savings through a dramatically simplified approach. Add in the fact that DDN’s resilient, extensible storage technology provided evidence for seamless expansion from a half-petabyte to 100PBs, and we found exactly the foundation we were looking for.”

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Video: SSD Higher Speed Devices – Architectural Interconnect Impact

Rich Brueckner — Wed, 22 May 2013 15:14:10 +0000

In this video from the 2013 Open Fabrics Developer Workshop, Johann George from SanDisk presents: SSD Higher Speed Devices Architectural Interconnect Impact.

You can check out more OFA videos in our Open Fabrics Worshop Video Gallery.

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Video: SGI Update from HPC User Forum

Rich Brueckner — Fri, 17 May 2013 12:00:49 +0000

In this video from the 2013 HPC User Forum, Jill Matzke from SGI presents an update on the HPC customer activities including the new Pangea supercomputer at Total.

Download the slides (PDF) or check out the HPC User Forum Video Gallery.

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Performance & Functionality Testbed for Clustered Filesystems at Bank of Italy

Rich Brueckner — Sat, 11 May 2013 17:48:35 +0000

In this video from the Lustre User Group 2013, Giuseppe Bruno from the Bank of Italy presents: Performance & Functionality Testbed for Clustered Filesystems.

Download the slides (PDF) or check out more Lustre presentations in our LUG 2013 Video Gallery.

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Video: Managing and Monitoring a Scalable Lustre Infrastructure

Rich Brueckner — Fri, 10 May 2013 16:06:00 +0000

In this video from the Lustre User Group 2013, Makia Minich from Xyratex presents: Managing and Monitoring a Scalable Lustre Infrastructure. Download the slides (PDF) or check out our LUG 2013 Video Gallery.

During his talk, Makia mentions an excellent presentation from John West entitled What’s Missing from HPC.

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Jeff Layton on Tools for Data Migration

Rich Brueckner — Fri, 10 May 2013 15:37:29 +0000

Over at HPC Admin, Dell’s Jeff Layton writes that with today’s explosive data growth, at some point you will have to migrate data from one set of storage devices to another. To help move things along, he provides an overview of data migration tools.

At some point during this growth spurt, you will have to think about migrating your data from an old storage solution to a new one, but copying the data over isn’t as easy as it sounds. You would like to preserve the attributes of the data during the migration, including xattrs (extended attributes), and losing information such as file ownership or timestamps can cause havoc with projects. Plus, you have to pay attention to the same things for directories; they are just as important as the file themselves (remember that everything is a file in Linux). In this article, I wanted to present some possible tools for helping with data migration, and I covered just a few of them. However, I also wanted to take a few paragraphs to emphasize that you need to plan your data migration if you want to succeed.

As referred to in Layton’s article, this video from the Lustre User Group 2013 features Marc Stearman from LLNL presenting: Sequoia Data Migration Experiences. Download the slides (PDF).

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Video: Aeon Computing Showcases Intelligent Disk Arrays with Lustre and ZFS

Rich Brueckner — Fri, 10 May 2013 11:30:52 +0000

In this video from the Lustre User Group 2013, Doug Johnson from Aeon Computing describes the company’s Hydra storage arrays that marry the speed of Lustre with the HA capabilities of ZFS.

The Hydra60 is a combination Lustre OSS (object storage server) and OST (object storage target) with two active/active failover nodes and shared storage in a single system chassis with an ultra dense 60 drive 6Gb SAS storage infrastructure. With a unified and zonable 6Gb SAS dual-ported backplane and drives the Hydra60 can sustain a remarkable performance while providing high-availability to volumes or object storage. With external interface options including FDR Infiniband, 40/10GbE 1Gb Ethernet and supporting Linux and Lustre releases 2.x the Hydra60 makes an excellent storage platform for Lustre performance with HA operation. The design of Hydra60 provides an affordable, redundant and resilient storage platform by leveraging RAIDZ thereby eliminating the cost of hardware RAID controller technology.”

For more on Lustre, check out our LUG 2013 Video Gallery.

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Slidecast: ClusterStor 1500 Departmental Scale-Out Storage for HPC

Rich Brueckner — Thu, 09 May 2013 14:32:21 +0000

In this slidecast, Ken Claffey from Xyratex describes the company’s new ClusterStor 1500 storage system. Designed for scale-out HPC storage solutions, the ClusterStor 1500 delivers HPC performance and efficiency with help from the Lustre file system.

Departments within larger organizations or medium-sized enterprises today, especially in the commercial, academic and government sectors, represent an underserved market. They need high-performance and scalable storage solutions that are cost-efficient, easy to deploy and manage and reliable even under heavy workloads,” said Ken Claffey, senior vice president of the ClusterStor business at Xyratex. “Growth in this market segment is being driven by the increasing adoption of simulation applications in a wide range of industries from car and aircraft design to chemical interactions and financial modeling. Traditional enterprise storage systems are simply not designed to meet the performance needs of these applications, so we engineered and built the affordable and modular ClusterStor 1500 to bring the performance power of Lustre to this underserved and growing market in the way that only ClusterStor can.”

With the ability to scale performance from 1.25GB/s to 110GB/s and raw capacity from 42TB to 7.3PB, ClusterStor 1500 is purpose-built to satisfy data intensive department level compute cluster needs, ClusterStor 1500 is designed to provide best in class scale-out storage for middle tier high performance computing environments. The ClusterStor 1500 solution features scale-out storage building blocks, the Lustre parallel filesystem and a comprehensive management platform that eliminates the guesswork usually associated with building and optimizing your own HPC storage solution.

Read the Full Story * View the slides * Download the MP3 * Subscribe on iTunes * Subscribe to RSS

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Video: Software vs. Hardware RAID and Implications for the Future

Rich Brueckner — Thu, 09 May 2013 11:00:40 +0000

In this video from the Lustre User Group 2013, Alan Poston from Xyratex presents: Software vs. Hardware RAID and Implications for the Future.

Download the slides (PDF) or check out our LUG 2013 Video Gallery.

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Video: Lessons Learned from the Blue Waters 1 Terabyte/sec File System

Rich Brueckner — Wed, 08 May 2013 13:27:51 +0000

Now that the deployment of the 1 Terabyte/sec file system at Blue Waters has been completed, what comes next? In this video from the Xyratex Blog, John Fragalla, principal solutions architect at Xyratex, discusses the value that ClusterStor brings to the HPC market and what the company has learned from designing and deploying ClusterStor solutions.

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Video: HPCS I/O Scenarios Update

Rich Brueckner — Tue, 07 May 2013 16:57:34 +0000

In this video from the Lustre User Group 2013, John Carrier from Cray presents: HPCS I/O Scenarios Update.

Download the slides (PDF) or check out our LUG 2013 Video Gallery.

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Video: High Availability in Lustre

Rich Brueckner — Mon, 06 May 2013 14:50:56 +0000

In this video from the Lustre User Group 2013, John Fragalla from Xyratex presents: High Availability in Lustre.

Download the slides (PDF) or check out our LUG 2013 Video Gallery.

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