Key Points
- Commodity scale-out architectures are vital to large-scale research and computing projects
- Coraid EtherDrive has been deployed in a variety of HPC projects, delivering massive capacity and throughput at a fraction of the cost of legacy SAN systems
The unique and growing challenges of High Performance Computing (HPC) and High Performance Virtual Computing (HPVC) environments are a natural fit for Coraid’s scale-out architecture. Coraid customers have employed EtherDrive in large-scale supercomputing projects including human genome research, energy research, and government security applications.
In the old days, the only way to get better computing performance was to buy a bigger mainframe or SMP supercomputer. However, the challenge of scaling these systems, and the expense of specialized hardware, led to the adoption of massively parallel processing environments built on commodity CPUs. EtherDrive brings this same scalability and price-performance to the storage tier, an increasingly critical aspect of many HPC projects.
Human Genome Research
Human genome research projects need to process complex DNA sequencer images that are captured and fed into a high performance Linux computer cluster over a standard 10 Gb Ethernet connection. Projects like this require very fast shared storage that can keep up with the exacting performance needs of the cluster, scale to meet growing storage demands and support 10 Gigabit Ethernet connections running between the SAN storage and the HPC cluster.
The diagram above, illustrates just such a storage infrastructure running across Coraid EtherDrive storage appliances. With the help of EtherDrive performance advantages, 30% faster than Fibre Channel, and scale-out design, researchers are able to analyze data faster and store far more data. The system’s scalability and adaptability ensures the storage can scale to satisfy research demands for more cost effective storage and I/O performance with minimal management burdens.
It also gives tremendous amount of flexibility in how to configure the storage -- something that is critical in the fast-changing world of next-generation sequencing. Coraid EtherDrive provides a tremendously better price to performance value, 5-8X that of other storage platforms. With genomic research driving up data demand exponentially, EtherDrive is an affordable (starting at $600 per terabyte), reliable way to boost research speeds.
Finally, EtherDrive is also simple to administer, and its open standards-based architecture allows users to incrementally scale storage minimizing up- front costs, system overhead and maintenance.