Seagate is like that old adage “the quiet storm.” Recently a customer said to me, “I just saw that Seagate powers 40% of the Top 20 HPC systems in the U.S. – I didn’t realize that!” We may be quiet, but there’s a lot of power behind that “storm.”
Every year at Supercomputing, a list of the Top 500 HPC sites is announced. To make the Top 20 – the top 5% of the list – requires significant technical and product development investment, respect for the long sales cycles in this segment and the realization that change happens only slowly since HPC systems are so vital to driving forward its users missions. The other 6 of the top 10 have been on the list an average of 2.5 years.
In November of 2015 it was announced the latest 4 of the 10 HPC sites were powered by Seagate. In other words, 100% of the new entrants in the list of Top 10 fastest supercomputers in the world are powered by Seagate. In addition, 40% of the Top 20 on that list are also powered by Seagate. But wait – there’s more: more than 20% of the Top 100 fastest systems in the world are powered by Seagate.
This information is vital to all HPC users. Recently there was a storage suppliers site census done and it’s possible to misunderstand the findings without looking deeper into the data. Ninety percent of the respondent pool in this survey have “small” systems, which is to say having less than 1 petabyte of storage capacity. By the way, Seagate now has more than an Exabyte in production around the world. Not a bad for a product that’s been shipping for less than four years.
Here are some of the other announcements made at SC15:
- Seagate unveiled the expansion and upgrade of our HPC product portfolio, including a ClusterStor HPC Drive designed specifically for HPC and Big Data applications. Seagate is the only company in the world that makes a drive for HPC-specific workloads
- Upgrades to the Lustre-based ClusterStor platform. This next-gen ClusterStor platform (L300) expands our performance leadership for high performance storage. This new system is more than 50% faster than our previous generation system which is currently powering 5 out of the 6 systems worldwide running over 1TB/s
- We also extended the ClusterStor G200, which offers the same proven platform with IBM® Spectrum Scale™ as the parallel file system
- We also introduced the ClusterStor A200, a purpose-built object store active archive designed specifically for HPC
With this amount of R&D investment, innovation and commitment to HPC storage, it’s no wonder Seagate is the #1 choice for new supercomputers.
Check out this video from our Second Annual Seagate HPC User Forum and learn how Seagate and Atos designed a 50PB+ supercomputer that met the strict needs of power and space limitations for a major European climate center.
