New VNX HPC Series Simplifies Lustre Environments

EMC Press Release

New VNX HPC Series Simplifies Lustre Environments

VNX HPC Series Delivers 10s of GB/sec Bandwidth and 10s of Petabytes of Capacity

HOPKINTON, Mass. - June 19, 2012

News Summary:

• EMC expanded its portfolio for commercial High Performance Computing (HPC) with the new EMC® VNX® HPC series, a preconfigured hardware and software appliance.
• Through integration with Terascala's LustreStack software suite, the VNX HPC series simplifies storage management for complex Lustre environments.
• The VNX HPC series adds Infiniband connectivity, scales performance to 10s of GB/s bandwidth and scales capacity to 10s of Petabytes to meet the demands of Lustre workloads.

Full Story:

EMC Corporation (NYSE: EMC) today announced the new VNX HPC series, a preconfigured hardware and software appliance designed to simplify complex Lustre environments for commercial HPC customers. The VNX HPC series includes metadata and object servers, EMC VNX5100 metadata storage, VNX7500 object storage and the Terascala LustreStack software suite—delivering 10s of GB/sec bandwidth and 10s of petabytes of capacity. The HPC series expands EMC's commitment to the HPC market, transforming and simplifying unified storage for commercial HPC.

The Lustre SAN file system—which was developed for, and powers, the world's top supercomputers by delivering unmatched performance and scalability—is also known for its complexities associated with compatibility, deployment and ongoing configuration changes needed to deliver peak performance. Most commercial organizations that require the performance benefits of Lustre do not have the time, budget or required training to deploy and manage it. With the VNX HPC series, companies of all sizes in industries such as financial services, life sciences, manufacturing and oil and gas now have the option of utilizing Lustre with proven enterprise-class reliability and simplified end-to-end management. By focusing on simplicity first, EMC has made Lustre accessible, usable and cost effective for commercial HPC.

VNX HPC Series Technology Highlights:

Benefits of the VNX HPC series include new connectivity and scalability levels to meet the demands of Lustre workloads:

• Bandwidth scalability: VNX HPC series offers a base configuration delivering 8GB/sec read and 5.3GB/sec write performance with bandwidth expansion modules for linear scalability beyond 10s of GB/s reads and writes as measured by XDD benchmark.
• Capacity scalability: Supports 720 Terabytes and scales to 10s of Petabytes with the new capacity expansion modules.
• Infiniband support: Adds high throughput and low latency Infiniband connectivity to the Lustre Parallel File System.
• Increased simplification: Saves three to four weeks per year in deployment and upgrade time for a typical Lustre file system, with dashboard monitoring and single support contact.
• Enterprise reliability: Delivers enterprise reliability with five-nines availability and worldwide support.

Analyst Quote:

Terri McClure, Senior Analyst, ESG

"Lustre is one of the most powerful file systems on the market for handling HPC workloads and a natural fit for emerging commercial HPC applications. But the management complexity, especially in fast growing environments, can be daunting. Many of these organizations don't have the resources to take full advantage of complex Lustre based implementations. EMC is helping to change that with its VNX HPC series solution, which is appliance based for easy deployments and integrated with Terascala for simple end-to-end management and EMC global support."

Partner Quote:

Brandon Sanders, Director of Strategy and Technology, Data Strategy

"The combination of EMC's VNX and Terascala's LustreStack is very powerful—both for Data Strategy's customers, and for EMC's partners, who rely on best-in-class storage to satisfy customer demand for these types of solutions. This latest innovation from EMC is shaking up HPC storage and making the benefits accessible to a wide range of customers, ensuring that this important segment of the market has the power of simplified storage management at its fingertips."

EMC Executive Quote:

Eric Herzog, Senior Vice President of Product Management and Product Marketing, EMC Unified Storage Division

"Since EMC introduced VNX to the market, we have seen significant interest from the commercial HPC community in using EMC unified storage for Lustre-based HPC environments. With EMC's new VNX HPC series, the benefits of Lustre are now attainable without the barrier of complexity. Our focus on simplicity opens the door to commercial HPC storage management, ensuring that all organizations can capture the combined benefits of Lustre and EMC's VNX family."

Additional Resources:

• To learn more about the VNX HPC series contact the HPC Program Office atHPCProgramOffice@emc.com.
• Read about VNX HPC Series data sheet
• Press release: "EMC VNX Sets Performance Density Record With Lustre — Showcases 'No Compromise' HPC Storage"
• Press release: "EMC Expands 'No Compromise' Storage for High Performance Computing at SC11"
• Connect with EMC via Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn

About EMC

EMC Corporation is a global leader in enabling businesses and service providers to transform their operations and deliver IT as a service. Fundamental to this transformation is cloud computing.  Through innovative products and services, EMC accelerates the journey to cloud computing, helping IT departments to store, manage, protect and analyze their most valuable asset — information — in a more agile, trusted and cost-efficient way. Additional information about EMC can be found at www.EMC.com.