NEW ORLEANS -- At SC10, scale-out data center fabrics provider Voltaire (NASDAQ: VOLT) introduced a high performance computing (HPC) platform in collaboration with Supermicro that delivers ultra-fast, scalable and cost-effective storage for high performance clusters.
The RapidStorage Appliance consists of Supermicro's high-density double-sided storage servers and the Voltaire Storage Accelerator (VSA) software. Using Voltaire’s high-speed 10GbE or InfiniBand switches, multiple appliances can be interconnected to form a highly scalable and unified system with dozens of high-speed links serving data to clients in parallel at rates that are several orders of magnitudes faster than most existing storage systems.
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The appliance is billed as a building block for "massively scalable" high performance storage systems that can deliver millions of I/O operation per second (IOPS) and hundreds of Gigabytes/second (GB/s) with reportedly 100x faster access times than traditional storage systems. In a recent benchmark test at a large financial services institution, the companies claim a cluster of five VSA-powered appliances delivered 2.5 million IOPS and 30 GB/s of sustained traffic, with access times of 70 microseconds, significantly outperforming most high-end storage systems, and at a fraction of the cost.
The appliance is available through select Supermicro and Voltaire resellers and VARs.
“Storage I/O bottlenecks present a major challenge for high performance, data-intensive environments that, until now, required big IT budgets to attempt to eliminate them,” said Asaf Somekh, vice president of marketing, Voltaire. “With the Voltaire-Supermicro RapidStorage Appliance, customers can finally get incredibly fast storage access and colossal scalability at a reasonable price point.”
“This solution presents a major advancement in high-performance storage and enables customers to deploy petabytes of fast storage in just a few racks,” said Tau Leng, PhD, General Manager of Marketing and HPC solutions at Supermicro. “Our SC417 Double-Sided Storage features exceptional density and accessibility, which enables the RapidStorage Appliance to not only deliver excellent performance, but also offer a unique solution to the storage market.”
Voltaire’s VSA software is a storage acceleration and clustering application that provides ultra-fast remote block storage access over 10GbE and InfiniBand fabrics. VSA software leverages iSCSI or iSER (iSCSI RDMA Extension) to maximize throughput and process many transactions in parallel with very little I/O overhead.
Supermicro’s newest double-sided storage server SC417 currently supports up to 43TB of hot-swap SAS2 storage capacity in 4U. While the previous maximum in the market was 48 drives in the front, Supermicro reports that it has added 24 more hot-swap drives in the rear of the SC417 to deliver much more storage capacity.
More information is available at www.voltaire.com.
