I had the recent opportunity on January 25, 2012 to participate with our valuable partner Mellanox Technologies, Ltd. in a joint educational webinar. Mellanox is a leading supplier of high-performance, end-to-end connectivity solutions for data center servers and storage systems...
In order to minimize the use of space in the modern data center, many storage solution architects and storage subsystem users are turning to innovative packaging schemes to stuff as many hard disk drives (HDDs) and/or solid state drives (SSDs) into as small a volume as...
Data management is a hugely important aspect of storage, and yet interoperable standard approaches to perform it have been slow in coming. A few frameworks have become widely used, with DPMI for backup probably leading the pack. Emerging initiatives such as IRODS hold...
Checking and repairing large file systems has become one of the biggest challenges facing the technology. The utility that does this goes by the name of "fsck", and it iterates over the entire content of a file system checking for the integrity of the (relational) data...
File system performance is often a major component of overall HPC system performance, and is heavily dependent on the nature of the application(s) generating the load. To achieve optimal performance, the underlying file system configuration must be balanced to match the...
Applications will dictate the throughput and capacity of a HPC storage solution using Lustre. Lustre is a flexible file system that allows for scaling capacity horizontally or vertically to meet the application I/O requirements. Scaling capacity horizontally, or scaling-out,...
In our continued commitment and support of the Lustre® community, we have announced and released, in mid-October, a Lustre migrator tool that is available for use, licensed under the GPL 2.0, to the entire Lustre community. The Xyratex migrator tool converts Lustre file system...
I've had the privilege of participating in IDC HPC User Forum panel discussions for a few years and I always find the dialog engaging. Last month at the forum meeting in San Diego I joined six other Lustre community leaders from a cross section of organizations to discuss "The...
Lustre is not the only scalable parallel file system in the HPC world but, during it’s 10 year lifespan, it still dominates in eight out of the top ten HPC systems in the world and is in more than 70% of the Top500. Lustre is open source so it is not tied to a single vendor...
This Thursday, I’ll be speaking at South America’s largest HPC conference about breaking the I/O bottleneck in HPC storage so please join us if you’re planning on to be at the conference. I feel that as an industry, we face many architectural challenges around creating a...
