DENVER, Nov. 13 — ThinkParQ, the company behind the parallel file system BeeGFS, today announces immediate availability of the BeeGFS version 7.0 release candidate. While previous versions of BeeGFS are already running on systems of all kinds and sizes around the globe, including burst buffers, hyper-converged setups and of course dedicated high-performance enterprise storage, this new major release introduces several features that were desired by the BeeGFS community.

The new storage pools feature allows to combine different types of devices (such as SSDs and HDDs) in pools and enables users to control placement of their data. With this new level of control, users can have their current project pinned to the SSD pool to have the full performance of an all-flash system, while the rest of the data resides on spinning disks, where it also can be accessed directly – all within the same namespace and thus completely transparent for applications.

“BeeGFS 7.0 was designed after we noticed that performance of transparent SSD caching mechanisms for HDDs is still far away from the performance of an all-flash system. This is because transparent SSD caches cannot know which file will be accessed next or which of the less recently accessed files should better not be removed from the cache”, comments Sven Breuner, CEO of ThinkParQ. “With BeeGFS 7.0, the users can now make this decision based on their current projects or their most performance-critical data, and thus really get all-flash performance for their important workloads, while still having the cost-effective capacity of the spinning disks.”

Another new feature is metadata event logging. It enables capturing of information about which files have been newly created, removed or modified. This can be useful to avoid crawling of large file systems in various cases, especially for backups. And the new BeeGFS performance monitoring service (beegfs-mon) adds BeeGFS performance and usage information to a time series database, which makes it easy for a sysadmin or a user to see how the system or the job performed. From the time series database, the collected data can also easily be integrated into other monitoring solutions, such as Grafana.

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

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

If you are visiting SC17 in Denver, you can find the BeeGFS team at booth #2143 or join the BeeGFS BoF session on Thursday at 12:15pm in room 507 to help decide where BeeGFS should go next.

About BeeGFS

BeeGFS is a parallel file system that was designed specifically to deal with I/O intensive workloads in 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. BeeGFS transparently spreads data across multiple servers and enables direct communication between all clients and servers. Therefore, 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 thousands of scientific and industry organizations worldwide. Visit beegfs.io for more information.

About ThinkParQ

ThinkParQ was founded by the key people behind BeeGFS to deliver high quality storage to all organizations and industries, which have a need for fast, robust and scalable software-defined parallel storage. The company provides professional services and support and works together with system integrators to meet and exceed customer demands with turn-key solutions worldwide. ThinkParQ customers are coming from various sectors, including Financial Services, Life Sciences, Automotive, Oil & Gas, Media and Scientific Computing. Visit thinkparq.com for more information.

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Source: BeeGFS, ThinkParQ