Nov. 15 — After several months of intensive public beta testing, Fraunhofer ITWM and ThinkParQ announce immediate availability of BeeGFS version 6.0. Although the versioning scheme has changed, release 6.0 is the direct successor of the 2015.03 release series, which was in fact the 5th BeeGFS major release.

The primary focus for this release was the introduction of high availability for metadata servers as a new enterprise feature. Based on metadata replication across different servers, automatic failovers will happen in case a metadata server goes offline and automatic self-healing will resynchronize the servers when they come back online.

“This new release is another big step for the development of BeeGFS,” says Christian Mohrbacher, development lead of BeeGFS. “In combination with the high availability features of the BeeGFS storage service, which were introduced in the 2015.03 major release last year, fully fault-tolerant storage systems can now be built by solely using BeeGFS-internal functionality.”

While some of the BeeGFS users prefer to simply rely on RAID-level protection of internal drives to have an optimal price per performance ratio, others have chosen to go with external shared storage to allow server failover in the past. Compared to external shared storage, the new release now adds an even higher level of data protection by tolerating not only server failures, but also the loss of complete RAID volumes.

As always, the new BeeGFS release supports a wide range of Linux distributions and platforms, including x86, OpenPOWER, ARM and Sunway. Upgrades to the new release for existing users are trivially simple, as sysadmins simply need to update the BeeGFS packages to the latest version.

The new BeeGFS release packages and source code are available as free download from www.beegfs.com. Professional support is available from ThinkParQ in cooperation with international turn-key solution partners.

This week, the BeeGFS team can be met at the SC16 conference in Salt Lake City, Utah, booth #1243.

About BeeGFS

The BeeGFS parallel file system was developed specifically for performance-critical environments and with a strong focus on easy installation and high flexibility, including converged setups where storage servers are also used for compute jobs. By increasing the number of servers and disks in the system, performance and capacity of the file system can simply be scaled out to the desired level, seamlessly from small clusters up to enterprise-class systems with thousands of nodes. BeeGFS is powering the storage of hundreds of scientific and industry customer sites worldwide.

About Fraunhofer and the Fraunhofer ITWM

With more than 80 research units at different locations, the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft is the largest organization for applied research in Europe. The majority of more than 23000 staff members are qualified scientists and engineers. Fraunhofer hosts research centers and representative offices in Europe, USA, Asia and the Middle East. The Fraunhofer ITWM is located in Kaiserslautern, Germany. Its main business fields are industrial mathematics and information technology, with a dedicated Competence Center for High Performance Computing.

The Fraunhofer Competence Center for HPC (CC HPC) offers innovative HPC solutions for the industry and the HPC market. CC HPC’s research and development is focused on HPC tools, applications for seismic imaging, complete development and execution frameworks and server based visualization. The CC HPC works together with industry partners to develop HPC applications and to adapt software to HPC needs. Its main HPC tools are BeeGFS, the Global address space Programming Interface (GPI) and the GPI-Space parallel programming and execution framework.

About ThinkParQ

ThinkParQ was founded as a spin-off from the Fraunhofer Center for HPC by the key people behind BeeGFS to bring the file system to all organizations and industries, which have a need for fast and robust storage. ThinkParQ develops new features for BeeGFS in cooperation with the Fraunhofer HPC center, is responsible for support, organizes events and works very closely with system integrators in creating turn-key solutions.

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Source: ThinkParQ