SGI took the wraps off new storage products as part of the Fremont, Calif.-based high performance computing (HPC) company’s rollout of its Big Data technology portfolio.
Providing object-based storage capacity for organizations with multi-petabyte (PB) capacity requirements, SGI ObjectStore combines the company’s Scality RING software and Modular InfiniteStorage Server hardware to deliver a shared pool of storage that can handle thousands, even millions, of users, boasts SGI. ObjectStore can accommodate 2.8 PB per rack.
Data protection features include erasure code support and self-healing technology that doesn’t require RAID rebuilds. And it’s economical, too, claims SGI. “SGI’s ObjectStore solution can also save enterprise environments 40 percent or more in capital and operating expenses, even in comparison to public cloud storage,” said the company in a statement.
SGI is also targeting Big Data archives with SGI LiveArc AE, new software that runs on InfiniteStorage Gateway archival data appliance. LiveArc AE delivers automated indexing of metadata and file content, enabling text searches of archived files. Also included are data retention tools, policy-based remote replication and Write Once Read Many (WORM) support.
The storage offerings join SGI’s new InfiniteData Cluster computing systems. Pre-configured and optimized for Hadoop, the popular open source Big Data processing platform, InfiniteData Cluster systems are powered by Intel Xeon E5-2600 server chips and can house a dozen 4 TB drives per tray (48 TB total).
With up to 40 nodes and 1.9 PB of storage capacity per rack, InfiniteData Cluster offers “twice or more the compute and storage density per footprint of all other HPC solutions for Big Data analytics,” asserts the company. The factory-integrated systems ship with Cloudera’s Hadoop distribution, Red Hat Linux and SGI’s own Management Center software – a prepackaged setup meant to help organizations get their Big Data analytics efforts up and running in days rather than months.
“SGI’s expertise in designing and building some of the world’s fastest supercomputers enables customers to fully optimize High Performance Computing for Big Data analytics to achieve business breakthroughs,” said SGI CEO Jorge Titinger in company remarks. His company, “a Top 10 storage provider” he reminds, is applying its “expertise in Big Data storage to deliver solutions increasingly needed in today’s enterprise.”
Those solutions can help organizations exploit Big Data to further their business goals, suggested to Tim Stevens, vice president, Business and Corporate Development, Cloudera. Describing his company’s software as “a comprehensive data management platform,” Stevens said in a statement that “joint [SGI and Cloudera] customers gain a considerable competitive advantage as they address their big data challenges to gain value from all their data.”