DataDirect Networks announced new hardware meant to helps enterprises get up to speed on their big data initiatives.

The Santa Clara, Calif.-based high performance computing (HPC) data storage company took the wraps off its new GS7K Parallel File System Appliance. DataDirect Networks is positioning the GS7K as a storage foundation for big data analytics in the fields of life sciences, oil and gas, financial services and manufacturing.

Based on the company’s experience deploying general parallel file system (GPFS) storage solutions for resource-intensive IT environments, the GS7K can deliver shuttle data at a rate of 11 GB per second per 8U. Add more GS7Ks to the mix, and performance jumps to hundreds of GB per second and while providing petabytes (PB) of capacity, boasts the company.

Such lofty performance ratings are achieved with the help of DataDirect Networks’ Storage Fusion Architecture. The tech enabled last year’s SFA12KX appliance to deliver up to 1.4 million input/output operations per second (IOPS) and push data at rates of up to 48 GB per second.

DataDirect Networks’s GS7K hardware enables enterprises to build their big data storage environments as they grow. “For customers looking to jumpstart their big data projects, the GS7K provides organizations a cost-effective storage solution to meet their needs today, and as their data continues to grow, offers a sustainable model for massively scaling out data stores in the future,” said Michael Vildibill, the company’s vice president of Product Management, in a statement.

“The GS7K starts small as a single 4U chassis with [DataDirect Networks’] full featured, real time SFA storage operating system, embedded GPFS parallel file system and up to 60 drives. If that’s not enough, up to four 84-drive expansion chassis may be added for a total of 396 disks,” a company spokesperson told InfoStor via email.

GS7K supports a mix of solid-state drives (SSDs) and SAS hard drives. CIFS/NFS extensions provide network-attached storage (NAS) capabilities while the company’s Web Object Scaler (WOS) technology provides policy-based data tiering to tape or the cloud and offsite disaster recovery.

Data protection features include integrated backup, battery-backed cache, RAID and the company’s DirectProtect data integrity check and correction tech. Other bundled storage management features include support for snapshots, rollbacks, quotas and data replication.

DataDirect Networks GS7K appliance is expected to ship in January 2015.

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