Gain Consolidation for Shared Storage Assets

By DE Editors

At Supercomputing 2007 in Reno last week, SGI (Sunnyvale, CA) unveiled SGI InfiniteStorage NEXIS 9000 NAS, a platform for extracting high performance from file-based storage and gaining in storage consolidation efficiencies. Such efforts to develop new storage technologies have pushed scalability, file directory size, and performance to support accelerating data growth related to business, scientific, and digital media applications, the company says.

Where the platform’s solutions simplify shared storage and ease initial installation, automated asset discovery, and day-to-day management, the SGI InfiniteStorage NEXIS 9000 NAS enables large scientific, education, or enterprise teams to consolidate multiple departments on a single NAS platform and increase bandwidth to meet demanding performance requirements.

Using both remote direct-memory access (RDMA) over InfiniBand and an expanded cache architecture, solutions from the new platform improve performance through reduced CPU overhead, increased data throughput from disk to application, and the possibility of enabling more memory and disks on a single NAS solution. The new Super NAS platforms address the needs of large-scale consolidation projects and increase upward scalability for any shared storage environment.

The newest SGI NAS solutions also provide an alternative to Fiber Channel connections with the ability to combine InfiniBand, 10 Gigabit Ethernet, and Gigabit Ethernet in a single storage platform. The standard protocols simplify administration for lower total cost of ownership — any IT administrator with networking experience can now manage high-capacity, high-performance, consolidated shared storage.

The SGI InfiniteStorage NEXIS NAS family provides the efficiencies of common software including the new SGI Appliance Manager. Users can choose solutions that range from a 3TB compact 2U platform to a high-end solution with nearly half a PB of storage.

The SGI InfiniteStorage NEXIS 9000 NAS solution will be available in December. For details, go to the SGI NAS family.

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.