HPCwire: Crosswalk CEO Explains Storage Grid Solution

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January 26, 2007

Crosswalk CEO Explains Storage Grid Solution

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Crosswalk, Inc., a provider of intelligent storage grid systems that scale performance, access to data, capacity and resiliency, was recently voted the Most Innovative HPC Storage Technology or Product for 2006 by HPCwire readers. HPCwire asked storage industry pioneer Jack McDonnell, founder and CEO of Crosswalk, to provide his view on storage grids and their present and future impacts on HPC.

HPCwire: Why did you leave McDATA to start Crosswalk?

McDonnell: While still at McDATA, through experience and numerous conversations with end-users, industry experts and channel partners, one thing became very evident: a fundamental change must occur in storage systems and architectures. End-users have been demanding answers from their data to drive critical real-time business decisions and increase value in competitive markets. Yet technologies from today's vendors are not suited to deliver on this promise. End-users must choose among a hodgepodge of partial fixes and short-term "band-aids".

These end-users are demanding storage systems that enable efficient sharing and consolidation of data and storage, compelling changes in the storage architecture and real business value. It became clear to me that the vendor that is able to meet these demands would be very successful.

HPCwire: Can you tell our readers what exactly Crosswalk does?

McDonnell: At Crosswalk, we approach technology and solution development from a unique standpoint. We believe that the ideal storage system solution does not require a forklift upgrade, or disruptive change, but does mandate new thinking about innovative grid-based architectures and intelligent networked storage technologies. We believe the industry and user expectations need to shift from "point-solutions" that only address the symptoms to simpler and more comprehensive solutions that efficiently fulfill fundamental business objectives.

In response to the needs of the end-user, we have developed the iGrid Intelligent Storage Grid System. This software-based solution is built from the ground up to meet the high-performance storage demands of computational grids and clusters in environments where productivity, results and time-to-completion are all being adversely impacted by inflexible, segmented storage architectures. Instead, iGrid is truly adaptable, enabling users to add storage capacity whenever it's needed, and to make each and every storage volume available to each and every application server and end-user. The bottom line here is that iGrid empowers collaborative project team members to focus on their work, not storage work-arounds.

HPCwire: How would you define a storage grid?

McDonnell: At a high level, a storage grid is an architecture that incorporates well-understood grid principles that enable organizations to leverage and share disparate storage resources.

As a long-time storage industry participant, I have seen the industry conquer many of the basic storage issues. But, the HPC community has presented a variety of unique challenges to the storage industry that have largely gone unanswered. This is due to the simple fact that today's storage architectures are static and inflexible, and therefore have proven themselves incapable of meeting these challenges. We at Crosswalk determined early on that in order to solve these problems, a radically new architecture was needed. This new architecture must decouple the physical storage, and all of the physical storage challenges, from the applications to create a scalable shared infrastructure model that leverages economies of scale across the physical infrastructure. This is the premise upon which we built the iGrid Intelligent Storage Grid System.

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