By Bio-IT World Staff

November 11, 2015 | DataDirect Networks (DDN) announced a new storage platform this week: DDN SFA14K; the Texas Advanced Computing Center is the first announced deployment.

The hybrid storage and hyper-converged platforms deliver fast, dense storage with more than 6 million IOPS and 60GB/sec in 4U with scalability to nearly 7PB of capacity in a single rack. The SFA14K delivers hybrid block storage; the SFA14KE allows the embedded processor power to run virtual machines, embedded applications and file systems within the storage array to significantly reduce complexity, latency and data center footprint.

SFA14K is the new flagship products in DDN’s 14K product line, and is meant to be a simple route to take maximum advantage of a suite of new technologies including the latest processor technologies, NVMe SSD, PCIe 3, EDR InfiniBand and Omni-Path.  

The SFA14K options are the “simplest at scale,” Laura Shepard, DDN’s Director of HPC Markets, told Bio-IT World. “You can choose how to scale your system up or out. And you can start with a very large building block before you have to add another client to manage.

“What we find is that people are running their main workflow on traditional network attached storage, and what they’re finding is that the front end bottleneck from a networking protocol standpoint is pretty high; the front end bandwidth for the file system overall is pretty low; and once they get past that they’re likely to find a bottleneck at the back end in terms of how these nodes talk to each other at every request,” Shepard said.  

By integrating high-performance technologies from silicon, to interconnect, memory and storage, DDN designed SFA14K to deliver groundbreaking latency reduction, IO acceleration and increase the power of the innovation that can be delivered from each rack of data center equipment.

“With the 14K platform, DDN is departing from traditional high-performance storage approaches, fortifying its innovation leadership and transforming the speed, ease and efficiency by which Enterprise and HPC customers can solve their most complex data and analytics challenges,” said Molly Rector, DDN’s CMO, in a statement. “Our unmatched architecture integrates and takes maximum advantage of the latest, most advanced component technologies to drive extreme efficiency for mixed workloads, provide the widest breadth of interconnect options and the flexibility to scale up or to scale out to allow for optimized performance, density or both.”

Today DDN publicly announced the first 14K deployment; the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at The University of Texas in Austin chose the 14K system to work with TACC’s Lonestar 5 supercomputer.

“The most important factor in our storage decision was being able to scale out to very high performance and capacity levels,” said Tommy Minyard, director of advanced computing systems at TACC, in a statement. “With DDN’s latest and most powerful storage system, we will be able to support extremely data-intensive research projects across nearly every field of science—from a user running a single core to one running with 30,000 cores.”

The DDN system runs Intel Enterprise Edition for Lustre software, and is configured with 5PBs but can scale out to more than 100 PBs as needed. TACC’s storage growth has been doubling annually, a rate that Minyard attributes to, “non-traditional HPC research involving life sciences, biomedicine and unstructured data analytics.” The ability to exceed throughput of 100GB/second and more than seven petabytes of storage in a single rack lets TACC balance of performance and capacity within a smaller data center footprint.