Penguin Computing is developing what it describes as a highly efficient, large-scale cloud storage deployment with industry partners Calxeda and Inktank. Calxeda is a manufacturer of ARM-based SoCs (system on chip). Inktank is the company delivering Ceph – a scalable, open source, software-defined storage system.
The reference implementation integrates the Ceph storage system with Penguin Computing’s power-efficient UDX1, a server system based on Calxeda’s ARM based Energy Core SoC. The UDX1 accommodates up to 48 servers and 36 hard drives in four rack units with a five Watt power envelope per server, an order of magnitude less than traditional x86 based servers.
'Power, cooling and manageability have become the biggest challenges in modern data centres and large scale cloud storage platforms like Ceph use scale-out architectures to deliver performance and fault tolerance,' said Charles Wuischpard, CEO of Penguin Computing.
'The UDX1 is the perfect server platform for Ceph. It provides a very high compute and storage density in an extremely low power envelope. The Ceph-UDX1 combination is the ideal large scale storage platform for the datacenter of the future and we are planning to deploy this type of solution in our own public HPC cloud, Penguin Computing on Demand.'
