LSI Deploys Storage System based on XBB-2 Architecture

By DE Editors

LSI Corporation (Milpitas, CA) announced the first customer deployment of a storage system based on its new, seventh-generation XBB-2 architecture. Last September, a beta system consisting of more than one petabyte of storage was installed at the National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS) at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL; Oak Ridge, TN).

Acceptance criteria were met within three days of delivery, and testing will continue into 2008 during the next phase of the Department of Energy’s (DOE) petascale initiative at ORNL.

Based on its demonstrated bandwidth of 6.4GBps from disk and data integrity capabilities, the XBB-2 storage system was down-selected for evaluation by the NCCS at ORNL to provide the storage support for the world’s first petascale class supercomputer, states the release. NCCS at ORNL has been designated by the Secretary of Energy as the Leadership Computing Facility for the nation, to provide for unclassified research a resource 100 times more powerful than current capabilities.

The performance capabilities of the XBB-2 storage system make it ideal for the mixed high-performance computing (HPC) workloads of applications such as digital content, sciences, defense/intelligence, and energy. The flexible host interface design of the system provides HPC customers investment protection for future technologies including 8Gb FC, 10Gb iSCSI, QDR, and InfiniBand.

Support for multiple drive technologies ensures data can be stored on drive types that meet cost/performance goals. The XBB-2 system supports RAID 6,5,3,10,1,0 with LUN sizes of up to 448 drives (RAID10/1).

For details, go to LSI Corporation.

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