Storage Suppliers Show Off HPC Wares

Storage vendors are revealing a slew of high-end switches and energy-saving technologies at this week's Supercomputing 07 (SC07) conference in Reno, Nev.

Switch vendors, for instance, are outlining their roadmaps for 40-Gbit/s Ethernet, InfiniBand, and iWarp. Here is a summary:

Cisco

Cisco has unveiled its SFS 3504 Multifabric Switch, defined as a gateway switch for busting the bottlenecks that may occur between InfiniBand clusters to storage. This is the second generation of the technology Cisco acquired with its $250 million purchase of TopSpin in 2005. The switch features twelve 20-Gbit/s DDR InfiniBand ports; six 1-Gbit/s and two 10-Gbit/s Ethernet ports; and four 4-Gbit/s FC ports. A Fabric Analysis and Correlation Toolkit (FACT) comes with the switch for troubleshooting and bit error rate monitoring.

The SFS 3504 has been adopted at two user sites, including retailer Cabelas. It will be generally available next month for Fibre Channel and 1-Gbit/s Ethernet, with the 10-Gbit/s Ethernet modules due this spring. Pricing for a 256-node cluster would start at about $150 per port.Fulcrum and Luxtera

Switch maker Fulcrum Microsystems and cabling vendor Luxtera will demonstrate what they describe as the world's first 40-Gigabit Ethernet switch/router at SCO7 this week.

The demo uses either Fulcrum's FM2224 switch or the vendor's FM4224 router linked to a mezzanine card from Luxtera. This mezzanine card provides the interconnect to Luxtera's "Blazar" 40-Gbit/s optical cabling.

The two vendors claim the technology combo, dubbed "Reno," could form the basis of storage and HPC clusters, although the vendors have not revealed when these will be turned into an actual 40-Gbit/s product.

NetXenComponent specialist NetXen says its NIC products will now support the Internet Wide Area RDMA Protocol (iWarp), which is starting to feature in a number of announcements from storage and networking vendors.

iWarp essentially enables a computer or storage device to bypass the operating system when data is being transmitted, reducing the processing burden encountered when running Ethernet as a high-speed interconnect.

Starting in the first quarter of 2008, NetXen will offer a firmware upgrade for its NICs, which it is touting as a way for users to boost data center traffic.

By building iWarp support into its 10-Gbit/s Ethernet NICs, NetXen claims to offer performance on a par with InfiniBand.

QLogicOne of the busier vendors at SC07, QLogic made a flurry of announcements this week, including an InfiniBand Host Channel Adapter (HCA) and a switch for Oracle clusters.

The 7200 HCA, which will be available next year, is aimed at firms looking to link clusters together via InfiniBand, and it offers up to 1.9-Mbytes/s of bandwidth, according to QLogic.

The vendor also took the wraps off its SilverStorm 9020, an InfiniBand fabric switch capable of supporting up to 22 host devices in an Oracle cluster. QLogic has not yet revealed pricing for the 9020 switch, which is available.

The Aliso Viejo, Calif.-based vendor also made a number of partner announcements at SC07, confirming that its 9000 Series InfiniBand switches have now been qualified to work with NetApp's FAS offerings.

QLogic also unveiled a partner program called HPCTrack to boost interoperability between InfiniBand vendors. Storage vendors that have already signed up for HPCTrack include DataDirect, Falconstor, Isilon, Panasas, and Quantum.Woven Systems

Switch manufacturer Woven Systems took the wraps off the TRX 100, a 48-port Gigabit Ethernet Edge Switch, and added an interface card for its EFX 1000 fabric switch.

The one-rack-unit-high TRX 100 contains 48 10/100/1000BASE-T ports and four 10-Gbit/s uplinks.

The TRX 100 can be connected to the vendor's EFX 1000 switch via the XFP interface card, which was launched today.

Woven is now touting this combo as the industry's highest capacity Ethernet Fabric switching solution, claiming that a TRX 100 linked to an EFX 1000 can support 10-Gbit/s throughput across 4,000 ports.Pricing for the TRX 100, which is available today, starts at $7,950. Woven has not yet revealed pricing for the XFP interface card, which will be available in April of next year.

DataDirect Networks

Array vendor DataDirect Networks will also launch new hardware this week, unveiling its high-end S2A 9900 device, which will be the first of its products to feature Massive Array of Idle Disks (MAID).

"It was really [about] customer demand," says Josh Goldstein, DataDirect's vice president of product marketing. "Users have these multi-Petabyte archives of data and they wanted to manage the operational costs of those systems to reduce the power draw and the resulting cooling requirements."

DataDirect is the latest in a small but growing number of vendors that have deployed MAID technologies in an attempt to cut users' power costs.MAID systems, which are championed by Copan, Nexsan, Fujitsu, and NEC, typically use a small number of spinning disks that serve as a cache for a set of non-spinning, passive disks. If a data request is not found in the cache, the appropriate passive disks are powered up.

DataDirect's Goldstein could only estimate the power savings offered by the 9900 as compared to its non-MAID predecessor, the 9550. "It varies depending on how many drives are in the system and how many drives you put to sleep," he says, adding that the MAID capabilities could save a typical user around 100 Megawatts of power a year.

The vendor has also bulked up the capacity of the 9900 array, which offers up to 1.2 Pbytes of storage, compared to the 9550's 960 Tbytes.

DataDirect is positioning the 9900 against EMC's Clariion CX3-80 when it is launched early next year, although the vendor has not yet released pricing for the product.

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