HPC | News

High Performance Computing Storage Supports 2 Petabyte File System

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 08/29/11

Black Sky, a high-performance computing (HPC) company, has introduced a new storage system that, in its most generous configuration, supports 180 TB of storage in a 4U chassis. The company's Apollo enterprise storage system specifically for HPC environments is available in three models, priced from $28,000 to $46,000.

The company said that its high-end offering can be expanded to support a single file system of more than 2 PB.

"We created this product because we looked for an HPC storage system for our own internal cloud and for our customers for more than a year and found nothing that satisfied all the requirements for compute-intensive applications," said Scott Alexander, company co-founder and CEO. "The only offerings with sufficient [input/output] were cost prohibitive because they weren't designed for high performance computing or render farms."

He added that an important component of the new storage series is "proportional network bandwidth in and out of the device, which will cripple HPC applications if not done correctly." Data communications can be ordered in one of three versions:

• Eight 10 Gbps Ethernet ports and four gigabit Ethernet ports;
• Dual 40 Gbps QDR Infiniband ports and four gigabit Ethernet ports; and
• Four gigabit Ethernet ports.

The storage system is designed for redundancy. It includes two motherboards and supports RAID 1 and 6. If a drive fails, it can be replaced without data loss.

The system also includes a Web-based user interface that simplifies initial installation and future expansion.