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Original URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/06/27/xyratex_hp/

I'm the world's fastest! No, I am! And I'm staggering, too!

HPC works of heartbreaking genius argue as HP goes SMB

By Chris Mellor

Posted in Storage, 27th June 2012 07:19 GMT

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ISC 2012 Xyratex has formally launched its ClusterStor [1] high-performance computing drive arrays, saying it's the fastest data storage array for high-performance computing in the industry. At the other end of the scale HP has revved its X5000 NAS filer upping capacity and adding iSCSI SAN access.

Xyratex' ClusterStor 6000 is a pre-configured, rack-level storage cluster, that offers from 6GB/sec to 1TB/sec Lustre file system processing capability. It's speed claim conflicts with that of Panasas [2] which produces, it says, "the world's fastest parallel storage system."

Panasas more explicitly claims it can scale "performance to a staggering 150GB/s, the industry's highest single file system throughput per terabyte of enterprise SATA storage."

The ActiveStor 12 product, using the PanFS filesystem, scales to 1.6GB/sec for writes and 1.5GB/sec for reads, roughly half as fast again as the ClusterStor 6000

Ken Claffey, Xyratex' business line manager for ClusterStor products, said:

"We claim 2x the performance based on the fastest competitor we could find which was the DDN SFA12ke which claims 20GB/sec file system performance per rack."

A DDN SFA12K-20e rack consists of ten 4U base enclosures and does 20GB/sec in a single system. The SFA12K-40 [3] does 40GB/sec in a single system.

Xyratex' ClusterStor 6000 achieves 6GB/sec from one 5U SSU, Single Storage Unit or base enclosure, and there can be seven in a rack with promised linear performance scalability, meaning 42GB/sec per rack. This is, indeed 2x, better than 2x, the DDN SFA12K-20e's performance and a smidgin faster than the SFA12K-40's 40GB/sec.

The Panasas PAS 12 does up to 15GB/sec per rack according to an ESG validation paper [4] and so Xyratex' claim is confirmed.

We now have a 3-way race to produce cost-effective, space-efficient and high-performance HPC storage arrays with open source Lustre-based systems from DDN and Xyratex positioned against the management ease of the integrated software/hardware products from Panasas.

HP X5000 unified storage

HP has boosted its X5000 G2 filer appliance, the one using Windows Storage Server 2008 introduced in November last year [5], by adding:

- Small Form Factor (SFF) drive chassis with 36 X SFF disk drive slots
- Three orderable product configs based on that
- Support for 3TB 7,200rpm 3.5-inch disk drives in the Large Form Factor (FLL) X5000 G2 chassis, meaning a 48TB to 192TB capacity range • Orderable X5000 G2 LFF config with eight 3TB drives.

The X5000 has a file deduplication feature that HP says can recover up to 40 per cent of the system's capacity. It makes the point that, as the X5000 is Windows-based, it's fully compatible with Windows Active Directory, Distributed File System (namespace and replication), Microsoft System Center and more.

The system can also do iSCSI block access; it having a Microsoft iSCSI software target inside.

The 48TB capacity model [6] uses four 300GB 2.5-inch 10K SAS drives and 16 2TB 7.2K 3.5-inch drives. Each X5460sb controller blade has two x 2.5-inch drives pre-loaded with the Windows OS and are not used for data. That means 32TB is available for user data.

HP's X5000 FAQ [7] says:

"Using four D2600 Disk Enclosures and 3TB drives, up to 192TB of raw user capacity is available for a single X5000 G2 Network Storage System."

That's a useful jump in capacity up from the previous 100TB maximum. ®