FRANKFURT, Germany and SANTA CLARA, Calif., July 13 — Continuing to build on its unmatched leadership in HPC storage, DataDirect Networks (DDN) today unveiled its new entry-level, turnkey Lustre storage appliance at the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC). As a founding member of OpenSFS, DDN was the first storage vendor to support Lustre and sells and supports more Lustre environments than any other storage vendor in the world. Expanding on this experience, the DDN EXAScaler 7000 (ES7K) leverages Lustre 2.5 pre-installed and fully optimized for DDN’s high-density storage appliances. ES7K delivers enterprise-level features including simple management and monitoring interfaces, and HPC-level performance that optimizes both mixed and parallel I/O performance.

DDN’s ES7K delivers reliability and support combined with open source innovations to deliver the fastest and highest-density Lustre appliance on the market.  Built specifically for organizations with data-intensive, high-performance storage requirements, the ES7K provides a simple, cost-effective way to leverage the benefits of DDN’s award-winning high-performance storage architecture with open-source Lustre file systems.

As with all the DDN EXAScaler appliances, the ES7K offers unique DDN-developed Lustre features that are fully backed by Intel support. Simple to install, configure and manage, the ES7K scales out to deliver massive storage performance density with a broad feature set and the flexibility of open source.

DDN ES7K advantages over competitive alternatives include:

• 3x faster performance: Maximizes ROI by delivering the highest performance per rack unit for HPC applications.
• More than 2x greater storage density: Starts at tens of terabytes and scales to nearly a petabyte of capacity by leveraging the highest density per rack unit for optimal efficiency.
• The Lowest TCO:  Starts with the smallest configuration and scales non-disruptively with additional ES7K building blocks.
• Simplest Deployment and Management: Configuration and deployment optimization features, integration with drive-to-file system monitoring, and metadata convergence options make the ES7K the ideal platform for migrating an application or an entire workflow to Lustre.

“DDN is a strong member of the Lustre community and is valued for its contributions in the areas of performance and management of Lustre-based storage systems. With years of experience in designing, installing and supporting Lustre-based storage, DDN offers a high performing appliance built on Intel Enterprise Edition for Lustre leveraging Lustre 2.5,” said Brent Gorda, GM of Intel’s High Performance Data Division. “Lustre’s momentum in the market is strong and accelerating. In the high performance technical computing arena, Lustre has been widely embraced by national labs and universities, and now we are seeing traditional industries like research, oil and gas, manufacturing, and financial services actively adopt Lustre. Intel is excited to see DDN expand its Lustre offering with the new ES7K appliance, and we look forward to continuing our strong collaboration in the area of performance-driven solutions.”

“DDN is the primary storage vendor for some of the highest-scaling, most performance-critical HPC installations in the scientific and commercial markets. Now DDN has used that expertise to create an entry-level Lustre appliance aimed at making it easy and affordable for more organizations to migrate to parallel file systems,” said Steve Conway, IDC research vice president, high performance computing and data analysis. “The new ES7K appliance should appeal to users with simulation workloads and to the growing contingent of commercial firms turning to HPC for advanced analytics.”

The new ES7K appliance is being previewed at the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC), booth #1010, in Frankfurt, Germany July 12-16. The ES7K is scheduled for general availability in the third quarter of 2015.

DDN: New European Customers

Along with the introduction of the new ES7K, DDN announced today three new European HPC users who have selected DDN solutions to easily deploy a Lustre solution for the most efficient, highest-performance acceleration of their workloads: CYFRONET, Public Health England, and Wroclaw Centre for Networking and Supercomputing.

CYFRONET the Academic Computer Centre in Poland that is home to Prometheus, the most powerful supercomputer in the history of Poland, relies on DDN Lustre appliances to accelerate and optimize its big data workflows.

Public Health England (PHE) is pioneering a next-generation, centralized sequencing service to generate and analyze the near-complete genetic code of pathogenic bacteria and viruses. By storing its generated data on DDN’s cloud and big data storage systems, PHE is able to accelerate its sequencing service time to results from days to hours and improve public safety intervention.

The Wroclaw Centre for Networking and Supercomputing employs DDN’s EXAScaler appliance to support vital research such as the Prognocean project + service, which produces real-time predictions of sea level change with lead times up to three months.

“With our DDN-powered solution, we are able to leverage DDN’s extensive Lustre 2.5 experience, and industry-leading storage performance and density to reduce computation time while offering 6x greater capacity for storing complex scientific models,” said Pawel Dziekonski, senior IT specialist, HPC Department, Wroclaw Centre for Networking and Supercomputing. “Simple to install and manage, our DDN storage system provides consistently high performance across our mixed workload environment, has improved collaboration with research scientists and is expediting time to results.”

About DDN

DataDirect Networks (DDN) is the world leader in massively scalable storage. Our data storage and processing solutions and professional services enable content-rich and high-growth IT environments to achieve the highest levels of systems scalability, efficiency and simplicity. DDN enables enterprises to extract value and deliver business results from their information. Our customers include the world’s leading online content and social networking providers, high performance cloud and grid computing, life sciences, media production, and security and intelligence organizations. Deployed in thousands of mission critical environments worldwide, DDN’s solutions have been designed, engineered and proven in the world’s most scalable data centers to ensure competitive business advantage for today’s information powered enterprise. For more information, go to www.ddn.com or call 1-800-837-2298.

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Source: DataDirect Networks