ACADEMIA

GridIron Systems introduced OneAppliance, a comprehensive suite of solutions designed especially for accelerating Big Data analytics, based on engineered systems that match the unique workload characteristics of Big Data to Multi Level Cell (MLC) Flash for optimal performance. For the first time, GridIron's OneAppliance solutions enable enterprises to use the same infrastructure to seamlessly combine structured, unstructured or mixed Big Data processing. A GridIron OneAppliance system reduces complexity, while increasing computing performance, bandwidth, and scalability so IT departments can protect their infrastructure investments and utilize resources in a more cost-effective manner.

"As more organizations want to harness the power of 'Big Data' to drive business improvements, new IT infrastructure challenges to support it are emerging," said Mark Peters, senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. "GridIron recognizes the need in Big Data environments for a 'balanced data delivery infrastructure' as a result of the typical demand for a mix of structured and unstructured; and to address this need, its OneAppliance suite promises to relieve serious data-access bottlenecks by better balancing processing and storage, and thereby helping organizations to deliver on the potential of Big Data."

The OneAppliance suite represents a significant breakthrough for organizations running clustered applications that often struggle to deliver performance under concurrent workloads and fail to utilize the full capabilities of hundreds, or even thousands, of physical servers and storage devices. In contrast, GridIron's OneAppliance provides up to twenty times the bandwidth of even the fastest Flash solutions available today and can reduce space and power consumption by up to 60% while reducing the total cost of ownership for Big Data infrastructure by 75%.

GridIron's new FlashCube, iNode and RackPack rack-mounted systems are part of the OneAppliance suite of solutions built for unified Big Data analytics:

OneAppliance FlashCube -- Ultra-high Bandwidth Acceleration for SAN-based Infrastructure

The GridIron OneAppliance FlashCube is the first ultra-high bandwidth unified data store for the aggregate read and write performance demands of Storage Area Network-based clustered applications. Combined with the GridIron TurboCharger, it provides a complete solution for the shared demands of Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC), including Database Smart Flash Cache and intermediate TEMP stores, to speed up Extract/Transform/Load (ETL) or join operations. The FlashCube is intended for seamless deployment in Oracle Automatic Storage Management environments. It delivers industry-leading performance and bandwidth, with 1 million Input/Output operations per second (IOPS), bandwidth in excess of 10 Gigabytes per second (GB/s) and 25 to 100 terabytes (TB) of Flash capacity.

OneAppliance iNode -- Compute-integrated Big Data Appliance

The GridIron OneAppliance iNode integrates high-performance compute with engineered high-bandwidth Flash data store to offer the industry's first all-Flash Big Data appliance. This architecture removes the limitations of PCIe attached Flash that typically tops out at 2 GB/s with densities well below 5 TB of capacity. The iNode has 40 cores with 2-way hyper-threading with up to 1 TB of Random Access Memory and 100 TB of Flash that is capable of 1.5 million IOPS and 20 GB/s bandwidth. It's the highest performance server Flash system available in the industry today. This revolutionary approach breaks through the imbalance of today's server-Flash solutions by providing unprecedented scale and bandwidth to meet the demands of multi-core servers. The iNode is a single 10 rack unit system that can simplify and consolidate sprawling clusters of storage and servers without sacrificing performance. This system is designed for data marts, data warehouses, Online Analytical Processing (OLAP), and Enterprise Resource Planning environments. It can be used as a Hadoop node or as a cloud-container for virtualized SQL or NoSQL clusters, delivering improved resiliency and manageability.

OneAppliance RackPack -- Scale-out All-Flash Big Data Appliance for Hadoop and Oracle RAC

The GridIron OneAppliance RackPack is designed for data processing needs beyond 100 TB and reaching into Petabytes. This unified compute and storage system outperforms all other vendors' offerings with up to 40 GB/s bandwidth and 4 million IOPS. This scale-up and scale-out system is designed for the most demanding clustered Big Data and High Performance Computing applications. A RackPack can have up to 40 state-of-the-art Sandy Bridge servers (supplied by GridIron's server partners), up to 250 TB of Flash and can run a Hadoop cluster, or 32-node Oracle RAC, or a combination of Hadoop/Hbase/SQL Relational Database Management System to house a customer-specific data processing flow. The unique stateless compute cluster can combine shared-nothing and shared-everything processing in one appliance to provide unprecedented flexibility in mixing applications and backup processes.

The OneAppliance FlashCube, iNode and RackPack will be showcased at Collaborate 2012 from April 23 through 26 (booth #1615). All OneAppliance models are available for qualified customer evaluations starting May 2012.