LSI Corporation has launched its Engenio 7900 HPC storage system, which is suitable for applications requiring uninterrupted data access.
Designed for compute-intensive applications and high bandwidth workloads, the 7900 HPC storage system is ideally suited for environments with high volumes of data processing and computing demands such as government labs, defence, media and entertainment, energy, oil and gas, biosciences and geospatial companies.
Based on the LSI seventh-generation XBB2 architecture, the 7900 HPC storage system provides industry-leading bandwidth of 6.4Gb/s on sustained reads from disk – a 4X performance improvement over the previous generation, and sustained write performance of 5.4Gb/s. The system also provides enhanced availability and reliability features designed to help ensure continuous high-speed data accessibility and protection across a wide-range of high-performance computing (HPC) workloads. High availability features include fully-redundant components and data paths with automated failover, online administration, drive health monitoring, controller cache mirroring and hardware-assisted Raid 6.
The 7900 HPC storage system is also designed to seamlessly adapt to evolving infrastructure, application and capacity requirements. It offers field-replaceable host interface options, including 4Gb/s Fibre Channel (FC) and 20Gb/s InfiniBand; flexible Raid protection levels (0, 1, 3, 5, 6 and 10) to meet the protection/performance requirements of the most demanding applications; and linear scalability up to 256 FC or SATA drives at initial release. Subsequent releases will provide scalability up to 480 drives and support for future technologies including 8Gb/s FC and 40Gb/s InfiniBand. The configuration flexibility of the system allows customers to mix host interfaces, Raid levels and disk drives in a single system for optimised price/performance and investment protection.
Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), the Department of Energy's largest science and energy laboratory, purchased four Engenio 7900 HPC beta systems utilising an InfiniBand interface and more than 1 petabyte of storage, in September 2007.
‘Since installation of the 7900 HPC we have been impressed with the reliability and overall mature state of the product prior to general availability,’ said Shane Canon, ORNL project leader. ‘The cache mirroring feature is a strength, as is the ability to create flexible configurations that meet the needs of a diversified cross section of processing requirements. We worked closely with LSI and were pleased with our interaction with their field and engineering staff.’
