SCIENCE

Boston Limited unveils the latest addition to their range of multi-award winning Igloo storage appliances at Stand 1110 - Boston.co.uk.

Optimized for high performance, high availability storage applications, Boston’s innovative Igloo 3U NXStor SBB appliance is based on the industry standard SBB (Storage Bridge Bay) specification and is a fully redundant, fault-tolerant, storage “cluster in-a-box”.

Boston’s highly innovative NXStor SBB storage appliance has been designed to overcome the performance and bandwidth limitations of generic storage platforms. With over 20 years of experience in the manufacturer of high performance clusters and storage solutions, Boston Limited’s exciting new appliance provides industry leading price, performance, availability and scalability.

With an ever increasing incline in both the speed and quality of seismic imaging and modeling data, the sheer increase in the size of datasets using today’s latest technologies have highlighted the need for low cost flexible, reliable, scalable and high performance storage.

Designed specifically to provide industry leading performance and maximum availability, the NXStor SBB can be optimised to suit client’s exact needs for industries such as Oil & Gas exploration, Geological, 2D & 3D image processing, seismic data processing/acquisition and many more.

Particular attention has been paid to the optimization of I/O bandwidth for transactional data where both hardware and software are optimised to share data with numerous high performance clusters whilst providing genuine scalable performance as needs evolve with growth to Petabytes of storage and beyond.

Manoj Nayee, Managing Director of Boston Limited, says “Our innovative NXStor SBB solution harnesses the power of NexentaStor to provide an all-encompassing platform, optimized to deliver a flexible, scalable solution. Thanks to the relationship with Nexenta, we are able to work alongside partners to provide them with a range of fully redundant, high availability clustered storage solutions that are designed and optimised to meet clients specific needs whilst assuring industry leading value.”

The Igloo NXStor SBB utilizes 12 x 3.5” hot-swappable SAS HDD’s alongside with 3 x high performance SAS SSD disks to assure industry leading I/O acceleration. Two STEC 8GB SSD drives are used in a mirror as an accelerated write cache for the traditional spinning disk array whilst the third STEC SSD (a 400GB device) is used to compliment the system RAM as an adaptive, second level, read cache. The result of these extra caching levels is a significant increase in I/O performance - in many cases up to 10x better than standard storage arrays.

In benchmark testing, the Igloo 3U-05 NXStor SBB has been shown to produce a staggering 50,000 IOPs versus just 6,000 IOPs from the same test on a similar standard disk array without SSD I/O acceleration.

Memory bandwidth has also been optimised with the adoption of Netlist’s latest HyperCloud memory modules that allow for the solutions to operate at both maximum memory bandwidth at a full 1333MT/s speed for maximum application performance.

This dramatic improvement over traditional disk arrays shows significant cost advantages over alternative monolithic storage implementations required to deliver an equivalent level of performance, ideal for supporting oil and gas companies in their exploration and production efforts, especially in specialized data processing and seismic imaging.

Industry leading publication Storage Magazine says,“The Igloo NXStor SBB offers a superb range of network storage features along with top performance and a remarkable expansion potential. Best of all, it delivers a fault tolerant storage cluster in a single system that’s very easy to deploy and manage”.