STORAGE

Engenio 7900 HPC system enhancements reduce power consumption and footprint; maximize storage performance with fewer connections: LSI Corporation has introduced its new Engenio DE6900 high-density SATA drive enclosure and 8Gb/s Fibre Channel (8GFC) host connectivity as enhancements to its flagship LSI Engenio 7900 HPC storage system. Designed for compute-intensive applications and high-bandwidth workloads, the 7900 HPC storage system combines leading-edge performance with enterprise-class availability and reliability features for applications requiring continuous high-speed data accessibility. "The amount of cooled, raised floor available at commercial and government-sponsored, high-performance data centers is at a premium," said Steve Hochberg, senior director, HPC segment, LSI. "When combined with the low-cost, high-density SATA drive enclosure and 8Gb/s Fibre Channel connections, the 7900 HPC storage system provides organizations with dramatic savings on power consumption and floor space while continuing to provide high performance for data-intensive applications." High-density enclosure improves energy efficiency by 30 percent Based on sixth-generation LSI architecture, the Engenio DE6900 high-density SATA drive enclosure enhances the 7900 HPC system's ability to handle the massive data requirements of high-performance computing (HPC) applications. The DE6900 is a 4U, 19-inch rack-mountable drive enclosure capable of housing a total of sixty 3.5-inch low-cost, high-capacity SATA drives for a maximum capacity of 60TB in a single enclosure. The new enclosure offers a 2.8X density increase compared to the current sixteen-drive Fibre Channel (FC) enclosure, enabling more drives per unit of rack space and scaling capacity to 480 SATA drives within the same footprint. The increased density translates into more than 30 percent savings on power consumption and greater than 65 percent savings on floor space to achieve similar performance and capacity. High-efficiency power supplies and variable-speed cooling fans further reduce power consumption. "Escalating floor space requirements and rising energy costs are among the top concerns of high-performance computing customers today," said Ian Miller, senior vice president of Sales and Marketing at Cray Inc. "The new high-density enclosure from LSI allows the 7900 HPC system to directly address these concerns. We look forward to delivering the solution to our customers." Serviceability and data availability are enhanced with easy access front-load drive trays and dampeners for controlled drawer movement -- avoiding I/O degradation from acceleration and deceleration of drives. All drives are active when drawers are open allowing individual drives to be replaced without impacting the operation of other drives. Safety is also enhanced by the reduction of forward-hanging mass during service operations. "For many years, Silicon Graphics and LSI have worked hand-in-glove to provide HPC customers with a family of tightly-integrated, highly efficient, high-performance storage solutions," said Kurt Kuckein, SGI InfiniteStorage product line manager. "With today's announcements, we're able to offer our customers a high-density storage solution on our flagship mixed workload storage system, the InfiniteStorage 4600, increasing scalability while simultaneously lowering power consumption." Maximize storage performance with 8GFC host connectivity The 7900 HPC is one of the industry's first storage systems to offer 8GFC host connectivity. The sixteen 8GFC host interfaces enable organizations to consolidate, simplify and lower the cost of SAN infrastructure by decreasing the number of host and switch ports required to deliver equivalent or increased performance. With the addition of 8GFC to the existing field-replaceable host interface options, including 4GFC and 20Gb/s InfiniBand interfaces, the 7900 HPC storage system is designed to quickly and easily adapt to evolving infrastructure, application and capacity requirements. Users can mix host interfaces, RAID levels (0, 1, 3, 5, 6 and 10) and disk drives within a single system -- optimizing price/performance and future proofing existing FC SAN investments. The Engenio 7900 HPC storage system is available today through select OEM partners. The system will be on display in the LSI booth # 344 at the Supercomputing '08 (SC08) conference, which takes place November 15-21 at the Austin Convention Center. Additional information on the 7900 HPC system is available at its Web site.