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InfiniBand gear maker Voltaire unveiled several new products this week that are designed to improve storage networking on clusters and grids, including parallel file systems and clustered network-attached storage (NAS) over InfiniBand.
The new infrastructure epitomizes Voltaire’s desire to pare costs associated with storage while boosting the application processing power across every server in a cluster, using the speedy InfiniBand interconnect technology to do so.
Voltaire and rivals TopSpin and InfiniCon are using InfiniBand, which moves data at speeds up to 30 gigabits per second, to shuttle information across computer systems faster.
Voltaire designed the new products to solve the frequent bottlenecks associated with storage in high-performance computing (HPC) environments, according to Arun Jain, vice president of marketing.
Jain said Voltaire, which makes high-performance interconnects for grids and clusters to power applications on commodity platforms, is looking to expand its sphere of influence at a time when 300 of the top 500 supercomputers in the world (according to the Top500 list) are clusters. He also said grids and clusters are replacing large, monolithic servers.
“What we have been working on is to come up with storage solutions that are just as powerful as the interconnect solutions on the clustering side, and that’s what we’re launching here today,” Jain told internetnews.com.
NAS Cluster and File Systems
Voltaire has developed a NAS cluster for customers who need large file systems to house their data, providing access to a unified namespace up to 16 petabytes in size. The product, geared to let customers replace proprietary NAS devices with a small NAS cluster of higher performance, combines Terrascale’s TerraGrid — software that transforms standard Linux file systems into parallel file systems — and Voltaire’s interconnect gear.
Voltaire has also integrated its grid interconnect technology with multiple parallel file systems. Parallel systems are valued for their ability to allow nodes to talk to each other to perform tasks. With InfiniBand and parallel systems, Voltaire’s new product allows nodes to talk at 250 megabytes per second, up from 40 Mbps.
For the open source community, Jain said Voltaire has put together Parallel Virtual File System 2 (PVFS2), a new, clustered file system that facilitates input/output for large HPC clusters.
PVFS2 uses a stateless design that reduces the risk of multiple failures and the resources required for clustering many nodes. Customers can use Voltaire’s grid interconnect to deploy file systems that can scale to thousands of nodes, storing multiple petabytes of files.
PVFS2, combined with a 128-node Voltaire InfiniBand cluster, is being used by scientists in large applications at the Ohio Supercomputer Center.
Voltaire’s grid interconnect technology is also being used with Terrascale’s TerraGrid parallel I/O platform.
“While the vendor community has done a decent job in solving the file I/O problem using proprietary technologies, Voltaire is enabling the creation of massive clusters using industry standard platforms and technologies, such as iSCSI RDMA and InfiniBand, for both block and file I/O,” said The Taneja Group analyst Arun Taneja.
Virtualization Gains Legs
In other product news, Voltaire introduced new Fibre Channel and IP routers to provide high-performance I/O and resource virtualization for large clusters and grids that use InfiniBand.
Jain said the company’s I/O virtualization routers integrate with Voltaire’s ISR 9288 and ISR 6000 switches to enable a variety of storage solutions for large HPC clusters and grids.
The I/O virtualization routers and Voltaire’s InfiniBand switches allow a cluster’s storage file I/O, block I/O and networking traffic to be shared so that all of the server, storage and networking resources appear as pools of resources, a foundation for on-demand computing.
Meanwhile, Voltaire’s new Fibre Channel routers enable SAN connectivity for servers that support InfiniBand, eliminating the need for FC HBA adapters while also providing higher throughput to FC SANs.
The Voltaire IP router enables HPC and network applications to connect compute clusters and IP-based NAS storage to improve network performance. Lastly, the Voltaire IBNetBoot is a remote network boot product for diskless InfiniBand clusters.
Voltaire IBNetBoot provides a pre-boot execution environment (PXE) that can load an image over the InfiniBand network from a central location using TFTP and IPoIB protocols, as well as execute the content of the image. With it, customers can move to diskless environments to cut time for deployment costs associated with running clusters.
Article courtesy of InternetNews.com
