At the recent Supercomputing 2010 conference, IBM unveiled details of a new storage architecture design created by IBM scientists that will convert terabytes of pure information into actionable insights twice as fast as previously possible. Ideally suited for cloud computing applications and data-intensive workloads such as digital media, data mining and financial analytics, this new architecture will improve the speed of complex computations without requiring heavy infrastructure investment. IBM won the Storage Challenge competition for presenting the most innovative and effective design in high performance computing with the best measurements of performance, scalability and storage subsystem utilization.
Created at IBM Research - Almaden, the new General Parallel File System-Shared Nothing Cluster (GPFS-SNC) architecture is designed to provide higher availability through advanced clustering technologies, dynamic file system management and advanced data replication techniques. By "sharing nothing," new levels of availability, performance and scaling are achievable. GPFS-SNC is a distributed computing architecture in which each node is self-sufficient; tasks are then divided up between these independent computers and no one waits on the other.
As businesses search for ways to harness their large stored data to achieve new levels of business insight, they need alternative solutions like cloud computing to keep up with growing data requirements as well as tackling workload flexibility through the rapid provisioning of system resources for different types of workloads, according to IBM. "Businesses are literally running into walls, unable to keep up with the vast amounts of data generated on a daily basis," says Prasenjit Sarkar, master inventor, Storage Analytics and Resiliency, IBM Research - Almaden. "We constantly research and develop the industry's most advanced storage technologies to solve the world's biggest data problems. This new way of storage partitioning is another step forward on this path as it gives businesses faster time-to-insight without concern for traditional storage limitations."
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