Voltaire Ltd., a provider of scale-out data center fabrics, announced a new solution with Supermicro to deliver faster, more scalable and more cost-effective storage for high performance clusters. According to the companies, the Voltaire-Supermicro RapidStorage Appliance is a building block for massively scalable high performance storage systems that can deliver millions of I/O operation per second (IOPS) and hundreds of gigabytes/second (GB/s). The solution delivers up to a hundred times faster access time than traditional storage systems, the vendors claim.
Storage I/O bottlenecks present a major challenge for high performance, data-intensive environments that, until now, required big IT budgets to attempt to eliminate them, Asaf Somekh, vice president of marketing, Voltaire, tells 5 Minute Briefing. "If you look at the different emerging markets, especially cloud computing, and you look at their economics, their business model and the different parts of the data center, the one part that breaks their model is the storage part," he explains. "You see all of these relatively inexpensive, very powerful servers connecting to storage that is kind of yesterday's technology, but very expensive."
The RapidStorage Appliance consists of Supermicro high-density Double-Sided Storage servers and Voltaire Storage Accelerator (VSA) software. Using Voltaire's high-speed 10GbE or InfiniBand switches, the companies say, multiple appliances can be interconnected to form a highly scalable and unified system with dozens of high-speed links serving data to clients in parallel at rates that are several orders of magnitudes faster than most existing storage systems.
Voltaire's VSA software is a storage acceleration and clustering solution that provides fast remote block storage access over 10GbE and InfiniBand fabrics. VSA software leverages iSCSI or iSER (iSCSI RDMA Extension) to maximize throughput and process many transactions in parallel with little I/O overhead.
Supermicro's newest Double-Sided Storage server SC417 currently supports up to 43TB of hot-swap SAS2 storage capacity in 4U. While the previous maximum in the market was 48 drives in the front, Supermicro has added 24 more hot-swap drives in the rear of the SC417 to deliver much more storage capacity.
Somekh says the companies believe the appliance can be useful in several markets, the main one being cloud computing, where people need it for the dynamic data center with virtualization, as well as in business intelligence and analytics, where people have high performance storage needs.
The solution is available through select Supermicro and Voltaire resellers and VARs. More information is available here.