SCIENCE

Enhancements Include Pre-Configured Hadoop Server Support

SGI has announced that it now offers pre-configured data intensive solutions for its flexible and energy-efficient SGI Rackable and SGI CloudRack C2 family of rackmount and tray-based servers. These solutions support Hadoop as the overlying application layer, and can be designed and built with the customer’s choice of processors.

“As an open source, data-intensive programming framework, Hadoop is exploding in popularity,” said Bill Mannel, vice president of product marketing at SGI. “SGI offers a unique combination of eco-friendly hardware, open software, and expert services and support, making SGI the ideal choice for Hadoop customers. We recently completed construction of a very large Hadoop cluster for a customer in our Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, manufacturing facility, providing customized management software, and allowing our customer to use and test its system while its datacenter was being completed.”

In addition to data-intensive solutions, SGI offers other pre-configured solutions for high-frequency or algorithmic trading, web content distribution, cloud storage, high-performance academic computing and web social networking. SGI and its key customers in the cloud, at national supercomputing centers, in the financial industry and at national defense establishments work together to build these solutions from the best components available in the industry. Now every customer worldwide can take advantage of already completed work and deploy quickly by utilizing these robust and proven configurations.

“There is a wide spectrum of data-intensive problems in government, academia and the commercial world that need powerful solutions,” said Steve Conway, IDC research vice president, HPC. “These include fraud detection, financial and economic modeling, drug discovery and epidemiology, weather and climate modeling, oil exploration, power grid management, and many others. SGI offers products with strong memory and I/O capabilities that are purpose-built to excel on data-intensive tasks, as well as their compute-intensive counterparts.”

These solutions take advantage of new technologies introduced in the SGI Rackable and CloudRack server lines over the past quarter. Leading the technology push is the new SGI “D-Rack,” or “destination rack” cabinet offering, which consolidates many legacy cabinet designs into a single and highly flexible configuration. This new cabinetry is based around a 19-inch width and offers the following:

• Industry-standard depth and width with a hot and cold aisle configuration;
• Innovative back-to-back SGI configuration with thermally efficient, center-chimney cooling for half-depth chassis;
• Water-cooled configuration with rear-mounted radiators;
• Standard 42U size, with an extension allowing up to 48U;
• AC- or DC-based configurations.

SGI has also completed a major refresh to its Rackable standard-depth and half-depth chassis product family, upgrading all core infrastructures to enable 6 Gb/s SAS host and drive connectivity for storage server and EBOD storage configurations. This complete upgrade enables enhanced performance to the modular efficiencies of D-Rack and the Rackable line. Additionally, the Rackable line now fully supports new 3TB SATA drives, adding increased density to the current lineup of 2.5 and 3.5 inch SATA, SAS and SSD offerings.

In addition to the chassis refresh, SGI now supports:

• An AC version of its popular CloudRack tray-based server platform;
• Redundant Power Supply (RPS) in its Rackable 2005, 2U half-depth server chassis;
• A 24-inch width version of its Foundation rack, supporting both back-to-back and flow-through air configurations.

Availability

These pre-configured solutions are available for immediate ordering and shipment.