NEC's High-Performance Computing Group Europe (NEC HPCE) has supplemented its parallel file system concept, LXFS, with Raid storage solutions from Promise Technology. The first installations have been deployed in major German universities, a leading science centre in France and several leading European automotive company's R&D facilities.
Dr Andreas Findling, senior product line manager, NEC Deutschland, commented: 'Data centre demands for higher computing power, networking bandwidth and support for virtualisation applications are driving system requirements for improved host bus interface and Raid performance. The Promise Raid controller card, with 6Gb/s SAS and PCIe 2.0 is a key part of how NEC is meeting these demands.'
The NEC LXFS/Promise solution has been deployed at a leading French science centre, the first petabyte capacity project fully completed. This solution is a Raid 5 configuration with SAS cascading of VTrak E-Class systems. NEC developed the parallel file system to offer huge storage capacities especially for mid- and large-scale HPC-systems. NEC LXFS consists of one metadata block and at least one object store block. The servers in both blocks are bound together in a failover configuration and are able to cope with failures of hardware components. All components have multi-layer redundancies at the software and the hardware level. The metadata block is responsible for metadata services and it also takes the management role of the file server cluster. The object store block is the basic element of the scalability provided by NEC's approach. The bandwidth, as well as capacity, of the parallel file system scales with the number of object store blocks. Each OSB provides to 128 terabyte capacity using VTrak SAS Raid storage systems, extended by VTrak JBOD systems using Raid 6 in a dual, fully redundant system configuration.
'Working with a well-known company like NEC allows us to offer customers reliable turnkey systems and help them to extract maximum benefit from their technology products,' said Albrecht Hestermann, marketing director, Promise Europe. 'Our goal is always to enable our partners and customers to be as efficient and effective with their technology solutions as possible.'
