Xyratex announces mid-range HPC storage solution

Small startups and established enterprises alike now have cloud storage solutions being tailored for their specific needs. However, medium- and large-sized companies are often in a unique position when it comes to technology decisions. Affordability still matters, but the size of these organizations can dictate more robust infrastructure than in a small company. Xyratex, a Seagate Cloud Builder Alliance partner, recently announced ClusterStor 1500, a solution designed to meet the needs of this market.

“Departments within larger organizations or medium-sized enterprises today, especially in the commercial, academic and government sectors, represent an underserved market,” said Ken Claffey, senior vice president of the ClusterStor business at Xyratex. “They need high-performance and scalable storage solutions that are cost-efficient, easy to deploy and manage and reliable even under heavy workloads.”

One type of application that has contributed to high HPC demand is simulation. This type of software, which includes financial modeling and chemical interaction plotting programs, is used in a wide range of industries. According to Claffey, traditional enterprise storage systems have been unable to meet the high performance needs of applications like these.

ClusterStor 1500 places emphasis on easier management with its unique architecture that brings together disparate infrastructure components into an integrated “scale-out storage building block.” This flexibility allows customers to leverage performance from 1.25 GB/s to 110 GB/s, while capacity ranges from 42 terabytes to 7.3 petabytes.

Although HPC solutions are commonly used in supercomputing, Earl Joseph, program vice president of high-performance systems at IDC, noted that department-level use represents the market’s second-largest source of revenue. Joseph commended ClusterStor’s scale-out storage model that is able to accommodate “some of the largest and most challenging deployments in the world.”

2013-05-16T10:17:48+00:00

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