Seagate Boosts HPC Storage Density and Performance With ClusterStor L300 for Lustre

Seagate Technology plc (NASDAQ: STX) today introduced ClusterStor™ L300, the newest and highest performing version of its ClusterStor Lustre® storage architecture. The L300 integrates with Seagate’s new 3.5-inch ClusterStor HPC drive specifically designed for the high-performance computing market, establishing the company’s commitment to full HPC solutions.

The L300 delivers up to 112 gigabytes-per-second (GB/sec) throughput per rack when integrated with Seagate’s ClusterStor HPC drives, a performance improvement of 77 percent compared to previous ClusterStor systems. This level of performance density per rack unit helps customers reduce data center space, power and cooling costs while simplifying management and equipment requirements. Additionally, the solution optimizes random and sequential I/O workloads across the entire storage cluster, improving workflow productivity.

Seagate is also introducing its ClusterStor HPC Drive, which can be integrated with the ClusterStor L300 for extra high-performing storage in big data environments. The ClusterStor HPC Drive alone supports up to four terabytes in a single drive slot with the highest sequential data rate of any hard disk drive on the market at 300 megabytes-per-second. It produces 35 percent faster random performance than any other 3.5-inch drive, and is backed by a Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) of two million hours, making it ideal for the data ingest, access and reliability needs in today’s toughest HPC environments.

The new ClusterStor L300 contains technology innovation that supports an ‘extreme mode’ with up to 448 GB/sec performance per rack in addition to superior small file performance. This specific configuration combines Seagate’s latest Flash Memory technology with the ClusterStor L300 integrated storage solution for high productivity applications requiring the ultimate in performance quality of service for the most demanding workload requirements. The ClusterStor L300 also supports the use of Seagate’s Solid State Hybrid Drives providing a value option for transparent small file performance acceleration. The ClusterStor L300 Lustre solution supports Object Storage Target disk pool management that enables the creation of discrete storage pools for each type of media from Flash Memory, ClusterStor HPC Drives, Solid State Hybrid Drives and Capacity Drives as disk pools within the same file system. The disk pool management feature enables application consolidation within a single storage solution by providing the best performance quality of service value per individual application/workload.

The L300 also supports next-generation networks built for Exascale computing, including Intel’s Omni-Path and the Mellanox EDR 100Gb/s Infiniband.

“The L300 exemplifies Seagate’s growing leadership in HPC storage and embodies our multiple layers of innovation from the file system to the core storage media itself,” said Ken Claffey, vice president and general manager, Seagate HPC systems business. “ClusterStor integrates the latest in Big Data technologies to deliver class-leading ingest speeds, massively scalable capacities to more than 100PB and the ability to handle a variety of mixed workloads.”

The French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) intends to use ClusterStor L300 for its next-generation supercomputer. A key component of its defense simulation program (DAM), the supercomputer will have a computation capacity of 25-petaflops and 20 times lower electricity consumption than its predecessor.

“The Seagate ClusterStor L300 storage solution provides the best performance efficiency helping CEA-DAM to achieve the best value while reducing floor tile space requirements and power consumption cost,” said Didier Juvin, Simulation & HPC program director at CEA–DAM. “Seagate’s successful track record of supporting Lustre file system storage solutions provides the confidence to meet our productivity critical storage goals.”

Seagate also partners with Cray to help bring the fastest HPC storage file systems to life with the Cray Sonexion Scale-out Lustre Storage System:

“Seagate has long been an important and valued partner for Cray,” said Ryan Waite, SVP of product, Cray. “We are excited about increased bandwidth offered by the new HPC drives and the Omni-Path support, and we are looking forward to integrating this new technology into our Sonexion product line.”

The ClusterStor family architecture is built on Seagate’s field-proven enterprise-class storage design and Lustre, an open source parallel file system typically used for high-performance computing. Combining superior performance with ultra-efficient scalability, the ClusterStor family includes ClusterStor L300, ClusterStor A200, ClusterStor G200, ClusterStor 9000, ClusterStor 1500, ClusterStor Secure Data Appliance and Hadoop Workflow Accelerator for ClusterStor’s architecture.

Seagate ClusterStor L300 will be available in calendar Q1 2016. Learn more at Seagate’s booth 568 at the Supercomputing 2015 show November 16-19 in Austin, Texas.

About Seagate

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©2015 Seagate Technology LLC. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. Seagate, Seagate Technology, ClusterStor, Lustre and the Seagate logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Seagate Technology LLC or its affiliates in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks or registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners. Seagate reserves the right to change, without notice, product offerings or specifications.

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