ACADEMIA
NetApp Delivers Breakthrough Product
Network Appliance is now shipping its powerful new Data ONTAP GX operating system, giving customers with high-performance computing (HPC) applications extreme throughput, unsurpassed flexibility, and NetApp hallmark simplicity and reliability, which don’t exist in other options currently on the market. Data ONTAP GX is the result of over two years of strategic engineering work, combining the global namespace functionality of SpinOS (which NetApp acquired when it bought Spinnaker Networks) with the key data management, performance, and high-availability features of Data ONTAP 7G. Additional details on Data ONTAP GX are available at its Web site. Although the needs of NetApp enterprise customers are well served by the performance, features, and functionality of Data ONTAP 7G, HPC customers in the areas of energy (seismic processing applications), entertainment (movie content creation and visual effects rendering), and electronic design automation (chip design and simulation) have an insatiable demand for extreme levels of performance. Data ONTAP GX delivers what those customers need, along with a single global namespace, which enables multiple nodes to be presented to applications as a single system and data to be moved between storage nodes and/or tiers transparently, simplifying data retrieval and management. Coupled with the new FAS6070 and/or FAS3050 system, HPC customers can leverage the clustered file system technology inherent in Data ONTAP GX, which enables individual files or datasets to be striped across multiple nodes to achieve far greater performance than can be achieved with a traditional storage system. For instance, Data ONTAP GX, coupled with the new FAS6070, scales in capacity up to 6PB and achieves unprecedented industry performance of more than 1 million operations per second, based on the SPEC SFS benchmark.
“As beta testers of Data ONTAP GX, we were impressed with its performance and stability,” said Steve Kowalski, senior systems architect, Research and Development at Sony Pictures Imageworks. “Our technology profile at Imageworks is a hybrid, combining elements of enterprise infrastructure with high-performance computing. Data ONTAP GX from NetApp delivers high-performance features today, and we look forward to the enterprise features on the Data ONTAP GX roadmap.”
“NetApp is not asking me to trade management ease or system reliability for massive scale-out and amazing performance,” said Michael Thompson, senior systems engineer at Industrial Light & Magic. “Data ONTAP GX has been very impressive, with huge data throughput, a single global namespace scalable to multiple petabytes, no client-side software requirements, and ease of moving data between controllers and/or storage tiers. All this has me convinced that it’s the best HPC storage solution out there.”
“Performance is obviously an important criterion for HPC, but it's not the only criterion,” said Addison Snell, research director for HPC at IDC. “HPC customers cite ease of management, scalability, and data protection features as critical in making purchase decisions. Storage vendors who take a broader view of what HPC customers need will find themselves in a better position to address all of the customer’s concerns.”
Data ONTAP GX distinguishes itself among competitors with:
- Breakthrough performance. Data ONTAP GX provides linear scaling to extreme levels. A recent SPEC SFS test demonstrated performance of over 1 million operations per second, a leap of more than three times that of the next closest competitor.
- Linear scalability. Modular scalability ranges from small to huge, with the flexibility to optionally stripe volumes for massive throughput on a single file.
- Management ease and simplicity. The system scales to multiple petabytes under a single global namespace, no client-side software is required, and data can be easily and transparently moved between or among controllers and storage tiers to applications.
- High reliability. The NetApp WAFL file system is at the heart of Data ONTAP GX and is real-world proven in more than 60,000 installations around the globe. RAID-DP provides tolerance to multiple simultaneous disk failures, and Data ONTAP GX systems have no single point of failure.
“Until now, storage solutions have constrained HPC customers with large compute clusters,” said Patrick Rogers, vice president of marketing, Products and Alliances. “With Data ONTAP GX, NetApp enables HPC customers to unleash the value of their Linux compute clusters, providing the extreme performance they crave while bringing a new level of management simplicity to HPC environments.”
Data ONTAP GX is available immediately for customers in HPC environments. Pricing is available from NetApp sales and sales partners.
“As beta testers of Data ONTAP GX, we were impressed with its performance and stability,” said Steve Kowalski, senior systems architect, Research and Development at Sony Pictures Imageworks. “Our technology profile at Imageworks is a hybrid, combining elements of enterprise infrastructure with high-performance computing. Data ONTAP GX from NetApp delivers high-performance features today, and we look forward to the enterprise features on the Data ONTAP GX roadmap.”
“NetApp is not asking me to trade management ease or system reliability for massive scale-out and amazing performance,” said Michael Thompson, senior systems engineer at Industrial Light & Magic. “Data ONTAP GX has been very impressive, with huge data throughput, a single global namespace scalable to multiple petabytes, no client-side software requirements, and ease of moving data between controllers and/or storage tiers. All this has me convinced that it’s the best HPC storage solution out there.”
“Performance is obviously an important criterion for HPC, but it's not the only criterion,” said Addison Snell, research director for HPC at IDC. “HPC customers cite ease of management, scalability, and data protection features as critical in making purchase decisions. Storage vendors who take a broader view of what HPC customers need will find themselves in a better position to address all of the customer’s concerns.”
Data ONTAP GX distinguishes itself among competitors with:
- Breakthrough performance. Data ONTAP GX provides linear scaling to extreme levels. A recent SPEC SFS test demonstrated performance of over 1 million operations per second, a leap of more than three times that of the next closest competitor.
- Linear scalability. Modular scalability ranges from small to huge, with the flexibility to optionally stripe volumes for massive throughput on a single file.
- Management ease and simplicity. The system scales to multiple petabytes under a single global namespace, no client-side software is required, and data can be easily and transparently moved between or among controllers and storage tiers to applications.
- High reliability. The NetApp WAFL file system is at the heart of Data ONTAP GX and is real-world proven in more than 60,000 installations around the globe. RAID-DP provides tolerance to multiple simultaneous disk failures, and Data ONTAP GX systems have no single point of failure.
“Until now, storage solutions have constrained HPC customers with large compute clusters,” said Patrick Rogers, vice president of marketing, Products and Alliances. “With Data ONTAP GX, NetApp enables HPC customers to unleash the value of their Linux compute clusters, providing the extreme performance they crave while bringing a new level of management simplicity to HPC environments.”
Data ONTAP GX is available immediately for customers in HPC environments. Pricing is available from NetApp sales and sales partners. 