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There is fast, then there is "Scalable Fast"

Scalable Informatics (SI) makes fast storage systems. How do we know they are fast? Because SI provides the numbers upfront directly from the command line in founder Joe Landman's blog; Scalability.org. This year at SC12, SI was showing remarkable numbers, both in capacity and performance, for some of their products.

To give you an idea, consider the their JackRabbit JR4 60 unit. It is a 4U storage device that can hold up to 60 HDD's which translates in to 240 TB or data (that is just about a quarter petabyte of storage). In addition to high density, the system is specified at 7,000 MB/s read and write throughput. That works out to reading a 1 TB file in 144 seconds. You can see some real benchmark numbers on Scalability.org.

There are also 2, 4, and 5U options for the JackRabbit line. All systems provide TCP/IP, RoCCE, RDMA/IB, FC/FCoE target with options for 1,10, and 40 GigE and InfiniBand. Linux, Windows Server 2008/2012 x64, OpenSolaris: SmartOS, Illumian, OmniOS, Nexenta, Illumian are supported as well.

Stepping down a notch, SI also offer a lower cost, yet high performance storage solutions in their ΔV ("Delta V") systems. Like the bigger JackRabbit systems, the ΔV 60 offers 240 TB of storage in a 4 U package. The ΔV lines uses software RAID to deliver a cost effective storage solutions. Some benchmarks can be found on the Scalability Blog

SI also offers flash based storage. The siFlash line offer both SSD and PCIe based flash storage. The siFlash 4U can deliver a whopping 24 GB/sec and 3.2M IOPS from 96TB of raw solid state storage. A single siFlash 4U can deliver a 1TB file in 40 seconds. Like other SI storage devices the siFlash offers various numbers of GigE (1,10,40), InfiniBand, (and Fibre Channel) ports.

Finally, SI has announced their latest JackRabbit-EC line of ARM based storage devices. The high density power efficient storage systems use Calxeda EnergyCore product. The new JackRabbit-EC provides 240 TeraBytes (TB) raw capacity in a 4U chassis with up to 192 processor cores on 12 EnergyCore cards. This same unit is capable of leveraging sixty SSD devices for up to 960GB of storage.

SI has set a high bar for storage. In addition to individual storage devices, they also offer fully integrated parallel file systems (GlusterFS, Ceph, Lustre, FhGFS, and OrangeFS) build with SI storage devices. In addition to high performance, SI also provides a high touch approach to HPC. If you need a well engineered storage product, that performs better than almost anything you can find, then they may have the solution you have been seeking.

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