HP Eases I/O Bandwidth On Grids

Hewlett-Packard unveiled a new file server that enables bandwidth to be shared by distributing files in parallel across server and storage clusters, the vendor said Tuesday at the International Supercomputing Conference in Heidelberg, Germany.

The HP StorageWorks Scalable File Share is the second product from the company that uses a storage grid architecture and is the first product to use a new Linux clustering technology called Lustre, developed in collaboration with HP, the Department of Energy and Cluster File Systems Inc. Lustre can deliver 100 times more bandwidth than typical cluster technology, according to HP.

Lustre is already in use at the DoE's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), where it helps eliminate input/output bandwidth bottlenecks and saves users time copying files across hundreds of distributed file systems.

"HP's Lustre implementation on our supercomputer allows us to achieve faster, more accurate analysis," said Scott Studham, associate director for advanced computing at PNNL, in a statement. "This translates into faster time-to-solution and better science for our researchers, who are addressing complex problems in energy, national security, the environment and life sciences."

HP SFS is intended for high-performance computing environments and allows applications to see a single file system image, regardless of the number of servers or storage devices connected to it. Using HP's ProLiant servers and StorageWorks disk arrays, the new product offers protection from failures via redundant hardware and fail-over and recovery capabilities.HP SFS follows on last month's debut of HP StorageWorks' Reference Information Storage System (RISS), an archive and retrieval solution for storing, indexing and rapidly retrieving reference information for grid architectures.

HP SFS is available is available in two configurations, one with StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array storage and another with lower-priced StorageWorks Modular Smart Array storage. HP said it plans to add other storage types as its grid strategy expands.