INDUSTRY

IBRIX today announced that Alexa Internet, a subsidiary of Amazon.com, has implemented the IBRIX Fusion Parallel File System, an enterprise-class, software-based scalable file serving solution for its Alexa Web Search Platform. Using the Alexa Web Search Platform, developers are given access to the vast web crawl collected by Alexa Internet, and can search and process billions of documents. They can even create their own search engines. With IBRIX Fusion, Alexa can provide a data warehouse with the performance and scalability to support varying numbers of users, regardless of the complexity and size of their applications. In choosing a file system solution to store their customer output, Alexa had several goals. Niall O'Driscoll, Vice President of Engineering, explains, "At the onset, we didn't know if people would analyze 10 pages or 10 billion, so IBRIX was a solution that delivered the speed, scalability, and flexibility to handle any size or type of data mining application. First, we wanted to be able to respond to any user request without compromising performance and without some insurmountable bottleneck that would prevent adding more computers and storage down the road. Second, we needed the flexibility to upgrade or change out storage and server technologies without disrupting users. Lastly, we wanted to take advantage of new processor technologies and be able to configure storage to optimize performance--FC SAN, iSCSI, RAID, or whatever makes sense for our users and application mix. IBRIX is a solution able to deliver on all fronts." "The Alexa Web Search Platform provides customers with direct access to what is arguably the world's richest store of information," said Joe DeRosa, Vice President of Marketing, IBRIX. "As enterprises such as Alexa increasingly deploy cluster and grid computing architectures, the highly scalable nature of IBRIX Fusion permits the changing out of individual components to meet customer requirements, the leveraging of new technologies as they become available, and the most economical way to increase the performance of their applications and manage their large and dynamic compute and storage infrastructures." IBRIX Fusion Parallel File System Solution IBRIX Fusion is a software-only scalable file serving solution that allows enterprise system administrators to build file systems that can scale to up to 16 petabytes of capacity in a single namespace, and provide up to one terabyte per second of aggregate I/O throughput performance independently and non-disruptively. Equally applicable for both high-performance/high-throughput applications as well as metadata-intensive, small block enterprise applications, the multipurpose IBRIX Fusion file system solution delivers I/O performance and scalability that is greater than that achieved by other file systems. IBRIX Fusion is hardware, network, and protocol independent and can be deployed as either a host-installed cluster file system solution or exported over network file system (NFS), common internet file system (CIFS), or other industry standard protocols as a scalable network attached storage (NAS) solution.