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Entries filed under “Storage”

Xyratex ClusterStor Wins 2013 Cloud Storage Excellence Award

By Rich | Published January 26, 2013

TMC’s Cloud Computing Magazine has named ClusterStor by Xyratex as a winner of its 2013 Cloud Storage Excellence Award.

This award underscores the rapid adoption of our ClusterStor family of storage solutions, and the tremendous value it brings to data-intensive computing environments,” said Ken Claffey, senior vice president of the ClusterStor business at Xyratex. “The introduction of the ClusterStor 6000 was an important milestone for us, and in collaboration with our partners we’re helping end users achieve best-in-class performance, reliability and scalability – including implementing the fastest data storage system in the world.”

Read the Full Story.


Also posted in Business of Big Data, Cloud, Hardware, HPC | Leave a comment

Video: Xyratex CEO Steve Barber on their Developing HPC Storage Business

By Rich | Published January 24, 2013

In this video, Xyratex CEO Steve Barber discusses the company’s move to HPC markets with ClusterStor Lustre-based storage systems.

Looking forward, we are leveraging our years of unique knowledge and experience to create and deliver fresh, ground-breaking design approaches to enterprise class storage that meet the specific needs of High Performance Computing, Big Data and Cloud.

Now available through partner/resellers including Cray, Dell, and HP, ClusterStor continues to gain traction in the HPC space. At insideHPC, we think Xyratex is one company to watch.


Also posted in Cloud, Video | Leave a comment

Job of the Week: Senior Systems Engineer at Scalable Informatics

By Rich | Published January 23, 2013

Scalable Informatics is seeking a Senior Systems Engineer in our Job of the Week.

We are looking for a Senior Systems Engineer to be an individual contributor responsible for consultative pre-sales and post-sales support activities for customers. The pre-sales role will include both customer-facing, and customer-remote operations, including but not limited to overall architecture, planning and implementation of development and production systems in the customer’s environment. The post-sales role will also include customer problem triage, diagnosis, intervention, resolution, documentation, and customer followup.

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Henry Newman on File System Interface Futures

By Rich | Published January 15, 2013

Over at Enterprise Storage Forum, Henry Newman looks at the future of file systems and examines whether REST will overtake POSIX as an interface of choice for all applications.

We do not have a lot of POSIX file systems that scale today to 10s of PB and billions of files. There are three file systems in production with a parallel namespace (Gluster, PAN-FS, Lustre, and GPFS) and a new entry called Ceph. Ceph, GPFS Lustre and Pan-FS support parallel I/O, which is I/O from multiple threads (these threads could be running on multiple nodes) to a single file, but Gluster does not. On the other side there are dozens of vendors developing REST- and SOAP-based object management interfaces. Vendors are trying to create systems that support billions of objects in a single namespace. Given that the vendors are not constrained by the POSIX atomicity requirements and support for parallel I/O, this is far easier than developing this support inside a POSIX file system.

Read the Full Story.


Also posted in Ceph, I/O, Lustre, Software | Leave a comment

Henry Newman’s Top Ten Storage Predictions for 2013

By Rich | Published December 30, 2012

Over at Enterprise Storage Forum, Henry Newman from Instrumental is out with his Ten Storage Predictions for 2012, and his last one is more of plea for reason.

The industry really needs more than POSIX (open/fopen, read/fread,write/fwrite) and more than simple REST put/get interfaces for data in the future. Neither has the richness to address the myriad of polices that are needed in our future world. I predict that there will finally be some honest discussion about this amongst the customers that need it and the vendors that could create it. Maybe this should be my request to Santa. I have tried to encourage this discussion for years and I have gotten no traction.

Read the Full Story.


Also posted in Business of Big Data | Leave a comment

IBM Tape Stores Big Data from SuperMUC

By Rich | Published December 24, 2012

The Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ) has implemented an innovative IBM tape storage system to provide up to 16.5 petabytes of scientific data archiving and backup for the center’s SuperMUC supercomputer. Built with an innovative hot water cooling system, the SuperMUC combines 155,000 general purpose core processors with 320 terabytes of main memory to help scientists from across Europe study all fields of science.

What we needed was a system that could store the data streams of one of the fastest computers in Europe, using standard components to keep costs low,” said Werner Baur, director of the Storage Group at LRZ. “It had to be scalable so that it is able to keep up with the development stages of the SuperMUC and it had to be able to integrate with our IT environment. That’s exactly what we’ve got.”

The intelligent archiving solution consists of two highly scalable IBM System Storage TS3500 Tape Library systems equipped with 22 LTO 5 drives and 11,000 tape cartridges. All told, the solution has a storage capacity of 16.5 petabytes and is scalable to 40 petabytes. An IBM System x3850 acts as the archive server and is responsible for the management of metadata, the control of the mass storage device, and the control of the data flow. To ensure fast access to archived data, IBM System Storage DS3500 and IBM Storwize V7000 systems are used as high capacity disks, along with 6 terabytes of solid state drive (SSD) memory. Read the Full Story.


Also posted in HPC | Leave a comment

AWS Adds New EC2 Instance For Data-Intensive Applications

By Rich | Published December 23, 2012

Over at TechCrunch, Alex Williams writes that Amazon Web Services has added a new storage instance for data intensive applications. Designed for applications that require high storage depth and I/O performance, the High Storage Eight Extra Large (hs1.8xlarge) instances includes 120 GiB of RAM, 16 virtual cores (providing 35 ECU of compute performance), and 48 TB of instance storage across 24 hard disk drives capable of delivering up to 2.4 GB per second of I/O performance.

The storage on this instance family is local, and has a lifetime equal to that of the instance. You should think of these instances as building blocks that you can use to build a complete storage system. You should build a degree of redundancy into your storage architecture (e.g. RAID 1, 5, or 6) and you should use a fault-tolerant file system like HDFS or Gluster. Of course, you should also back up your data to Amazon S3 for increased durability.

The new storage instances are applicable to data warehouse applications, log processing and specific applications for verticals such as retail and energy. In related news, the recently announced AWS Data Pipeline service is now available. Read the Full Story.


Also posted in Business of Big Data, Cloud | Leave a comment

Spectra Logic Tape Libraries Earn Top Marks in Storage Magazine’s 2012 Quality Awards

By Rich | Published December 13, 2012

This week Spectra Logic announced that it has earned the top honors in the Storage magazine Quality Awards winning both the enterprise and midrange tape library categories.

Spectra Logic dominated this time around with the highest score in every [Enterprise] rating category,” said Rich Castagna, editorial director for the storage media group for Storage magazine and SearchStorage.com. “Spectra Logic’s performance in the midrange groups is equally impressive. The broader story is how satisfied users are with the tape storage systems, underscoring how vendors continue to produce high-quality and innovative products.”

This is the sixth time the company has won first place in a Quality Awards category, and caps a year of significant success and technological achievements, including the availability of 10GbE iSCSI connectivity, the commencement of LTO-6 shipments, and the installation of the 380 PBs nearline tape archive for NCSA’s Blue Waters supercomputing system, which is one of the largest and most powerful supercomputers in the world. Read the Full Story.


Also posted in Business of Big Data, Hardware, HPC, Tape | Leave a comment

Panasas Showcases Hybrid ActiveStor 14 at SC12

By Rich | Published December 7, 2012

In this video from SC12, Geoffrey Noer from Panasas describes the hybrid storage capabilities of the new ActiveStor 14 system.

The world’s fastest parallel storage system just got faster with Panasas ActiveStor 14. By accelerating small file and metadata performance with Solid State Drive (SSD) technology, ActiveStor 14 delivers extreme performance, for the technical computing and big data workloads commonly found in HPC environments. Based on a fifth-generation storage blade architecture and the Panasas PanFS storage operating system, ActiveStor 14 delivers unmatched scale-out NAS performance in addition to the manageability, reliability, and value required by demanding computing organizations in the bioscience, energy, finance, government, manufacturing, media, and other sectors.”

Read the Full Story.


Also posted in Hardware, HPC, Video | Leave a comment

Xyratex Announces OEM Deals with Dell and HP for Lustre Powered Storage

By Rich | Published December 3, 2012

In this video SC12, Mike Stoltz from Xyratex describes the company’s ClusterStor products for HPC. Xyratex recently announced that HP and Dell will resell ClusterStor to power their advanced HPC clusters.


Also posted in Business of Big Data, Events, Hardware, HPC, Video | Leave a comment

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