Xiranet Communications, a leading developer of high performance storage solutions, will exhibit its storage systems during the premier European HPC exhibition accompanying the International Supercomputer Conference (ISC) 2006 in Dresden, Germany from June 27-30. We will demonstrate scalable, high-performance native InfiniBand and 10 Gb iSCSI storage systems. Come and visit us at booth #C23. Clusters have been very successful for HPC style applications and have largely replaced special SMP systems. To a large extent this can be attributed to the significant progress in compute power of standard architecture servers and advances of interconnect networks. But a well balanced configuration is necessary to achieve good overall performance. Hence, storage increasingly is becoming a more important part of high-performance computing. Significant requirements are high performance, ease of management and scalability. The majority of cluster installations today use Gigabit Ethernet for the network. It is already integrated on standard servers used for clustering and is thus the least expensive solution. Typically a NFS server is used to provide storage resources for small installations. However, this approach is not applicable for larger setups or when higher performance is required. As a consequence, increasingly cluster file systems are used that access shared storage from a SAN. While Fibre Channel (FC) could be used for that purpose, it requires special switches and a host bus adapter for every node making the infrastructure more complex and expensive. Hence, block level storage needs to be accessible over standard cluster interconnects. With new protocols like iSCSI or SRP (SCSI RDMA protocol) this can be implemented directly over Ethernet and InfiniBand, respectively. Selectively using 10 GbE is a natural approach to improve storage performance of Gigabit Ethernet based clusters. Today, there are low cost Gigabit Ethernet switches available that add two 10 Gb Ethernet ports. A corresponding storage system can provide more bandwidth and thus support more nodes than with iSCSI over Gigabit Ethernet. For clusters where very high communication performance is required, specific interconnects have been used for along time. InfiniBand goes beyond that and provides an integrated network that enables data transmission for communication, IPC and storage. Thus, it can completely replace Ethernet within the cluster. Furthermore, it offers a leading price/performance ratio which makes it the prefered interconnect for high performance clusters. To fully exploit InfiniBand as an integrated network native storage solutions are required. This is achieved by supporting the SRP protocol. Xiranet offers the XAS500 as an integrated, entry level solution. It supports a maximum of 15 Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) or SATA disks providing a capacity of up to 7.5 TB in a 3U enclosure. The XAS1000 addresses higher storage capacity requirements. It features a modular architecture and consists of a controller head and one or more directly attached JBODS. Mixed SAS/SATA configurations and a capacity of more than 100 TB are supported. Using a second controller high availability can be achieved. iSCSI over GbE is supported throughout the entire product line. Parallel to that native InfiniBand storage or iSCSI over 10 Gigabit Ethernet is available as an option. Pricing for these systems starts at EUR 10.000 and includes a 3 year hardware/software maintenance. „Xiranet offers storage solutions that directly address the needs of the HPC market. Compared with NFS, utilising 10 Gb iSCSI storage systems and open source cluster file systems like GFS performance can be improved. For higher performance requirements InfiniBand is very attractive. With a sustained storage performance in excess of 700 MB/s using SRP, storage subsystems for very large clusters can be build in a cost effective manner”, explains Mirko Benz, CEO of Xiranet Communications.
About Xiranet Communications Xiranet Communications is a leading developer of innovative storage solutions. This includes iSCSI, Fibre Channel and native InfiniBand storage systems with high capacity and performance as well as storage router products. The product portfolio is especially focused on high performance computing (HPC) and rich media applications. By accessing storage via 10 Gb iSCSI or native InfiniBand very high performance can be achieved. Furthermore, there is no separate Fibre Channel SAN required leading to much lower costs. Founded in 2002, Xiranet is headquartered in Dresden, Germany. For more information, please visit www.xiranet.com.
About Xiranet Communications Xiranet Communications is a leading developer of innovative storage solutions. This includes iSCSI, Fibre Channel and native InfiniBand storage systems with high capacity and performance as well as storage router products. The product portfolio is especially focused on high performance computing (HPC) and rich media applications. By accessing storage via 10 Gb iSCSI or native InfiniBand very high performance can be achieved. Furthermore, there is no separate Fibre Channel SAN required leading to much lower costs. Founded in 2002, Xiranet is headquartered in Dresden, Germany. For more information, please visit www.xiranet.com.
