I'm the world's fastest! No, I am! And I'm staggering, too!

HPC works of heartbreaking genius argue as HP goes SMB

ISC 2012 Xyratex has formally launched its ClusterStor high-performance computing drive arrays, saying it's the fastest data storage array for high-performance computing in the industry. At the other end of the scale HP has revved its X5000 NAS filer upping capacity and adding iSCSI SAN access.

Xyratex' ClusterStor 6000 is a pre-configured, rack-level storage cluster, that offers from 6GB/sec to 1TB/sec Lustre file system processing capability. It's speed claim conflicts with that of Panasas which produces, it says, "the world's fastest parallel storage system."

Panasas more explicitly claims it can scale "performance to a staggering 150GB/s, the industry's highest single file system throughput per terabyte of enterprise SATA storage."

The ActiveStor 12 product, using the PanFS filesystem, scales to 1.6GB/sec for writes and 1.5GB/sec for reads, roughly half as fast again as the ClusterStor 6000

Ken Claffey, Xyratex' business line manager for ClusterStor products, said:

"We claim 2x the performance based on the fastest competitor we could find which was the DDN SFA12ke which claims 20GB/sec file system performance per rack."

A DDN SFA12K-20e rack consists of ten 4U base enclosures and does 20GB/sec in a single system. The SFA12K-40 does 40GB/sec in a single system.

Xyratex' ClusterStor 6000 achieves 6GB/sec from one 5U SSU, Single Storage Unit or base enclosure, and there can be seven in a rack with promised linear performance scalability, meaning 42GB/sec per rack. This is, indeed 2x, better than 2x, the DDN SFA12K-20e's performance and a smidgin faster than the SFA12K-40's 40GB/sec.

The Panasas PAS 12 does up to 15GB/sec per rack according to an ESG validation paper and so Xyratex' claim is confirmed.

We now have a 3-way race to produce cost-effective, space-efficient and high-performance HPC storage arrays with open source Lustre-based systems from DDN and Xyratex positioned against the management ease of the integrated software/hardware products from Panasas.

HP X5000 unified storage

HP has boosted its X5000 G2 filer appliance, the one using Windows Storage Server 2008 introduced in November last year, by adding:

- Small Form Factor (SFF) drive chassis with 36 X SFF disk drive slots
- Three orderable product configs based on that
- Support for 3TB 7,200rpm 3.5-inch disk drives in the Large Form Factor (FLL) X5000 G2 chassis, meaning a 48TB to 192TB capacity range • Orderable X5000 G2 LFF config with eight 3TB drives.

The X5000 has a file deduplication feature that HP says can recover up to 40 per cent of the system's capacity. It makes the point that, as the X5000 is Windows-based, it's fully compatible with Windows Active Directory, Distributed File System (namespace and replication), Microsoft System Center and more.

The system can also do iSCSI block access; it having a Microsoft iSCSI software target inside.

The 48TB capacity model uses four 300GB 2.5-inch 10K SAS drives and 16 2TB 7.2K 3.5-inch drives. Each X5460sb controller blade has two x 2.5-inch drives pre-loaded with the Windows OS and are not used for data. That means 32TB is available for user data.

HP's X5000 FAQ says:

"Using four D2600 Disk Enclosures and 3TB drives, up to 192TB of raw user capacity is available for a single X5000 G2 Network Storage System."

That's a useful jump in capacity up from the previous 100TB maximum. ®