Where Ready Nodes are the Optimal Choice

The perennial question for IT asset acquisition is whether to build or consume, and there is no ‘one size fits all’ answer to the question. Individual components provide the maximum flexibility, but also require the maximum of self support. Reference architectures provide the recipe and guidance, but the customer still has the responsibility for making the system work.

Network Switch Configuration with Dell EMC Ready Nodes

Storage networks are constantly evolving. From traditional Fibre Channel to IP-based storage networks, each technology has its place in the data center. IP-based storage solutions have two main network topologies to choose from based on the technology and administration requirements. Dedicated storage network topology, shared leaf-spine network, software defined storage, and iSCSI SAN are all supported. Hybrid network architectures are common, but add to the complexity.

Networking Dell EMC Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct Ready Nodes

Dell EMC Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct Ready Nodes are built on Dell EMC PowerEdge servers, which provide the storage density and compute power to maximize the benefits of Storage Spaces Direct. “They leverage the advanced feature sets in Windows Server 2016 Datacenter Edition to deploy a scalable hyper-converged infrastructure solution with Hyper-V and Storage Spaces Direct. And for Microsoft server environments, S2D scales to 16 nodes in a cluster, and is a kernel-loadable module, (with no RDMA iWarp or RoCE needed) which is a low risk approach to implementing an S2D cluster.”

Interview: Why Software Defined Infrastructure Makes Sense for HPC

“I came to IBM via the acquisition of Platform Computing. There’s also been other IBM assets around HPC, namely GPFS. What’s been the evolution of those items as well and how they really come together under this concept of software-defined infrastructure, and how we’re now taking these capabilities and expanding them into other initiatives that have sort of bled into the HPC space.”