SCIENCE

Texas Memory Systems has upgraded its RamSan-630 system with the IB-381 InfiniBand interface card. The IB-381 augments the RamSan-630's available Fibre Channel interfaces, giving users greater flexibility in connecting to high-performance storage networks. The IB-381 supports InfiniBand SCSI RDMA Protocol (SRP) over two Quad Small Formfactor Pluggable (QSFP) connectors. The use of a Mellanox ConnectX-2 chip ensures compatibility with most other Quad Data Rate (QDR) InfiniBand devices. The IB-381 also employs a dedicated 1-GHz PowerPC processor and a powerful Xilinx Virtex-6 Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) to obtain the utmost in I/O performance. The RamSan-630 can be configured with 5 dual-channel IB-381 cards for a total of ten links operating at 1 Million IOPS and 10 GB/second.

The typical HPC cluster often consists of hundreds or thousands of individual computers. Such a computing cluster demands the utmost in performance from attached storage devices, but at a cost-effective price. Users must perform a balancing act between the resources dedicated to CPU power, RAM capacity, external storage, and network connectivity. While HPC users have typically focused on increasing RAM capacity, expected dramatic price reductions for Flash-based Enterprise storage should facilitate a move toward a tiered storage architecture. The RamSan-630, with multiple InfiniBand cards, can be an effective piece of such a tiered architecture. Compared to other storage options, it provides a dramatic improvement in performance, capacity, size, and cost.

Installed in a high-performance network, the RamSan-630 provides centralized storage that is simultaneously accessible by many different computers. The RamSan-6300 system (a single rack of 14 RamSan-630 systems) offers 140 TB of storage capacity with virtually unlimited bandwidth. Regardless of the access mode (random, sequential, reads, writes), the RamSan-6300 provides 140 QDR InfiniBand ports, 140 GB/s of bandwidth, and 14 Million IOPS, while still dissipating only 7000 Watts. The InfiniBand-attached RamSan-630 and the fourteen-unit RamSan-6300 are available for order now.