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Cambridge Online delivers cost effective scalable storage for Linux ClustersOctober 2005 Cambridge Online announces that it has successfully delivered its first customer implementation, and the first in the UK of HP StorageWorks Scalable File Share (HP SFS) version 2.0 . Cambridge Online has worked closely with HP since early 2004 to evaluate HP SFS from before its general release, and has demonstrated and deployed Linux clusters using the technology. The new customer is a large biotechnology research institute who share the results of their laboratory and computational research with hundreds of worldwide collaborators. They required a reliable and cost-effective solution for high performance, scalable storage for their Linux cluster. This initial implementation of HP SFS 2.0, which is based on Lustre technology, has for the last 2 months given access to 12 TB of storage to a compute farm at a potential aggregated peak bandwidth of 800 MB/s. The new system allows the Linux cluster to run applications that require fast I/O across hundreds of distributed compute nodes, and replaces the use of Network File System (NFS) to share I/O which was too slow. HP SFS eliminates the need to manually pre-stage data files across the entire compute farm, a time and cost intensive practice commonly used today to solve the I/O bottleneck. The next phase of the implementation will involve the customer working with Cambridge Online to grow the implementation of HP SFS to provide a single, sharable, very high-bandwidth file system across the entire compute farm. With the newest version customers can now scale from 2-64 servers to give an unprecedented potential aggregated bandwidth of 35GB/s. The storage capacity will also scale, with the potential of over 512TB. Depending on the configuration, HP SFS can offer 3x the Bandwidth at half the price of scalable NFS offerings. Targeted initially for high-performance computing (HPC), HP SFS allows applications to see a single cluster file system image regardless of the number of servers or storage devices connected. And because the interface for these Lustre file systems is fully POSIX compliant, programs can run without modification. Built using industry-standard HP ProLiant servers and HP StorageWorks disk arrays, HP SFS provides protection from hardware failures through resilient, redundant hardware and built-in fail-over and recovery. |
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