Super Computing Conference Digital Storage Announcements

On this article we take a look at a number of introductions of digital storage associated merchandise on the 2023 Supercomputing Convention. Digital storage and reminiscence are crucial parts in excessive efficiency computing, together with AI. Specifically, introductions by DDN and Arcitecta and WDC for software program outlined scale-out storage and high-performance storage purposes.

DDN introduced its Infinia software-defined storage (SDS) platform focused for AI and cloud purposes. The determine beneath reveals attributes of this SDS system.

The core knowledge aircraft is predicated upon flash reminiscence for all of the storage, not simply major storage, together with using QLC flash for larger latency storage, scaling as much as 100’s of PB of storage. Writes are bundled in cache to scale back put on on the QLC flash. It’s meant to suit inside present buyer orchestration instruments and is {hardware} agnostic and helps multi-tenancy. The Infinia is supposed to assist purposes that don’t want the efficiency and scale of the corporate’s ESAScaler storage techniques.

The Infinia system is object based mostly at current however long term it’s supposed to assist containers and information in addition to objects, with every service having its personal container. DDN will probably be displaying AMD-based 1U servers as reference architectures with 12 hot-swapable 2.5” U.2 NVMe drive bays and as much as 4 200G community ports, with a minimal of 6 or these used to create a cluster appearing as an S3 object retailer.

In 2024 DDN says they may have a parallel filesystem designed for AI and cloud and assist superior database and knowledge motion.

Australia-based knowledge administration software program firm, Arcitecta introduced its MediaFlux Common Knowledge System, which mixed knowledge administration, knowledge orchestration, multi-protocol entry and storage in a single platform. It may well handle knowledge each on-premises and within the cloud and consists of globally distributed entry for 100’s of billions of information. The corporate says that it could actually do that at an order of magnitude much less value than legacy cluster file techniques.

Arcitecta has been constructed on high of third-party file and object storage techniques from different distributors, as proven beneath. An instance is its use with NetApp E-Sequence block storage though their largest market is with Isilon storage techniques.

Cluster file system storage runs at $100-$1,000 per TB however Arcitecta licensing is per consumer slightly than by capability. They advised me a worth as little as $100 per consumer, no matter storage capability used. There can nonetheless be a upkeep price.

Western Digital was displaying the corporate’s OpenFlex Data24 3200 NVMe-oF (NVMe over cloth) storage platform. This method can create a storage pool that may be shared by as much as six hosts with no change and helps distant direct reminiscence entry (RDMA) over converged Ethernet (RoCE) and is on the market in a 2U 24-bay platform with storage capacities as much as 368TB utilizing the corporate’s Ultrastar DC SN655 dual-port PCIe Gen 4.0 SSDs.

WDC was additionally displaying its hybrid storage JBOD Ultrastar Data102 and Data60 platforms to assist disaggregated storage and software-defined storage (SDS). This is available in dual-port SAS or single-port SATA configurations. The Data102 has storage capacities as much as 2.65PB and the Data60 has as much as 1.56TB in a 4U enclosure that features IsoVibe and ArticFlow applied sciences for improved efficiency and reliability. The Data102 and Data60 capability numbers assume utilizing 26TB SMR HDDs.

WDC was additionally displaying a GPUDirect storage proof of idea combining the corporate’s RaidFlex expertise with Ingrasys ES2100 with built-in NVIDIA Spectrum Ethernet switches in addition to NVIDIA’s GPUs, Magnum IO GPUDirect storage, BlueField DPUs and ConnectX SmartNICs. The proof-of-concept demonstration can present 25GB/s bandwidth for a single NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPU and over 100GB/s for 4 NVIDIA A100 GPUs.

At SC23 Arcitecta and DDN launched software program outlined storage options for AI and cloud purposes. WDC was additionally displaying SDS, its OpenFlex NVMe storage and GPUDirect storage.