| With the announcement of the HP StorageWorks Scalable File Share (HP SFS) 2.0, HP is providing customers with the simplest, most reliable, and cost-effective solution for high performance, scalable storage on Linux clusters in the industry. Based on HP's StorageWorks Grid architecture, HP SFS 2.0 with StorageWorks SFS20 disk technology offers customers potentially unlimited scalable storage capacity, and with the newest version customers can now scale from 2-64 servers and enjoy bandwidth up to 35 gigabytes per second - 3X the bandwidth at half the price of scalable NFS offerings.
Existing global file systems cannot support today's computational and data demands; many Linux clusters use slow, shared I/O techniques, such as Sun Microsystems' aging Network File System (NFS). HP SFS provides the best scalable Linux storage and the best price/performance storage for Linux clusters in the industry, with higher cluster throughput and fewer I/O bottlenecks.
Built from multiple, industry standard HP ProLiant or Integrity servers and HP StorageWorks disk arrays, HP SFS is a self-contained file serving appliance that delivers 10X more bandwidth than scalable NFS solutions. With HP SFS, bandwidth is scaled by distributing the files in parallel across clusters of servers and storage devices. Data storage is transformed from a server peripheral to a shared networked resource that is massively scalable, dynamically changeable, and managed as a single system image.
HP SFS can span dozens to thousands of clustered Linux servers, making it ideal to run distributed applications for data-intensive engineering and research projects in life sciences, government labs and universities, oil and gas, and digital animation. HP SFS customers include Scientific Supercomputing Center Karlsruhe (SSCK) in Germany, University of Kentucky Center for Computational Sciences, Canada's SHARCNET ( Shared Hierarchical Academic Research Network, and the National Center for High Performance Computing (NCHC) in Taiwan.
"Having a storage system that scales along with the increases in our computing capacity and demands is critical to SHARCNET's increasingly complex scientific and engineering applications," said Hugh Couchman, SHARCNET scientific director. "HP SFS provides that scalability, along with very high bandwidth. Such technology helps us produce and analyze data much faster and will dramatically accelerate research results."
Established in January 2001, SHARCNET is structured as a "cluster of clusters" across 11 academic institutions in south-central Ontario. SHARCNET's mission is to meet the computational needs of researchers as they accelerate the production of world-class research results, and to facilitate the development and testing of leading-edge tools for high performance computing grids.
The low-cost, high-performance, and resilient StorageWorks SFS20 disk technology used in HP SFS appliances enabled SHARCNET to expand their order to 480 terabytes of HP SFS storage to serve the I/O demands of the 1900 compute nodes in multiple Linux clusters, the largest HP SFS order to date.
HP SFS 2.0 - New Features
- Triple the bandwidth to over 35 gigabytes per second (GB/s) to maximize throughput on even the most demanding applications;
- Double the capacity to 512 terabytes (or more by request) to anticipate the exponential expansion of scientific storage;
- Streamlined entry level system - half the price of the previous version;
- The widest range of high-speed interconnect support, now including InfiniBand from Voltaire and others at over 1 GB/s per link;
- Improved ease of use - customers can install in only a few hours;
- Includes an NFS server to provide access for systems not yet Lustre™-enabled for storage access from almost any UNIX, Linux, or Windows server, workstation, or PC;
- Easy and expanded client support - Red Hat Enterprise Linux v3, v4, Fedora; SuSE Linux Enterprise Server v9; others Linux releases available;
- Enhanced monitoring and management - with Nagios software to rapidly detect anomalies in the hardware or software;
- Standard backup support - adds HP OpenView Data Protector and 3rd -party backup packages for essential data protection; and
- Updated Lustre 1.4 base release - offers faster performance, higher resiliency.
The HP StorageWorks Grid is a standards-based architecture developed by HP Labs that extends today's network storage capabilities to unprecedented levels. It divides storage, indexing, search and retrieval tasks across a distinct set of computing nodes or storage "smart cells." Each smart cell is an intelligent storage server that works in parallel with other smart cells on the shared StorageWorks Grid and can adapt to deliver information services in real time, laying the foundation for greater business agility and competitive advantage - key components of an Adaptive Enterprise. HP SFS 2.0 follows HP's March 2005 announcement of a new Application Programming Interface (API) for the HP StorageWorks Reference Information Storage System (RISS), an all-in-one archive and retrieval solution for storing, indexing and rapidly retrieving reference information. HP will continue to execute on its stated strategy around the StorageWorks Grid with new products and services. By 2008 HP will offer a completely unified StorageWorks Grid that delivers changeable smart cell functionality and virtually seamless virtualization.
Pricing and availability
HP StorageWorks Scalable File Share 2.0 has a starting list price of $44,000, (1) and will be available in July 2005. More information is available at http://h20311.www2.hp.com/HPC/cache/276636-0-0-0-121.html.
About HP
HP is a technology solutions provider to consumers, businesses and institutions globally. The company's offerings span IT infrastructure, global services, business and home computing, and imaging and printing. For the four fiscal quarters ended April 30, 2005, HP revenue totaled $83.3 billion. More information about HP (NYSE, Nasdaq: HPQ) is available at www.hp.com.
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