STORAGE

Silicon Graphics today unveiled new, factory-integrated cluster and enterprise-class storage products that deliver acclaimed SGI features and performance priced for greater accessibility to SGI technology. Together, the SGI® Altix 1330 cluster and SGI InfiniteStorage NAS 330 network attached storage solution bring SGI's advanced server and storage product families to more users than ever before. Available today, the two new products build on SGI's long history of solving some of the world's toughest compute, storage and data management problems in areas such as predicting global weather patterns, designing space shuttles, finding oil more efficiently or performing next-generation collaborative surgeries. The Altix 1330 cluster solution offers a powerful and integrated large-node cluster option to complement SGI Altix 3700 Bx2 supercomputers, SGI Altix 350 departmental servers, and recently announced SGI Altix 330 workgroup servers. The NAS 330 also extends SGI's rapidly growing line of mid-range storage and data management products, including the SGI InfiniteStorage S330, which for the first time made SGI's award-winning high-performance storage technology affordable for smaller workgroups. Altix 1330: Fast, easy and flexible The SGI Altix 1330 cluster combines SGI performance, scalability and reliability in a standards-based platform that protects customers' technology investments. Factory-integrated to order, Altix 1330 clusters are easy to implement and administer. The new clusters are powered by Intel Itanium 2 processors and support two industry-standard 64-bit Linux implementations. This combination of technologies and capabilities delivers a "future-proof" cluster solution that can accommodate virtually any emerging compute requirement. Built on SGI's renowned NUMAflex shared-memory architecture, the Altix 1330 is unique among cluster systems in offering the "best of capability" and the "best of capacity" computing. Capability computing codes and large data sets benefit from tightly coupled processors and globally shared memory; whereas capacity computing parallel applications are designed to distribute loads and data sets across processors, memory and local storage. By efficiently addressing both types of processing, the Altix 1330 cluster is uniquely suited to drive mixed workloads of all types. Other key benefits of the Altix 1330 cluster solution include: - Powerful Compute Platform: The Altix 1330 provides unmatched scalability in all dimensions, with the ability to scale out to hundreds of nodes and scale up to 16 processors and 128GB of shared memory per node. This provides customers with a platform that can efficiently handle mixed workloads, and easily meet current and future processing needs. - Industry Standards-Based: Altix 1330 offers users a choice of standard Red Hat Advanced Server or Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, Ver. 9, with optional enhancements available via the SGI ProPack 4 toolkit. Customers can choose from a broad range of leading technical applications that have been certified and/or optimized for the Altix platform. - Easy administration: Altix 1330 is a complete cluster solution, with Scali Manage cluster management software, Voltaire InfiniBand interconnect solutions or Gigabit Ethernet Interconnect, Platform LSF system management software. SGI offers full support for the Altix 1330 hardware and system software. - Lower cost of ownership: Altix 1330 scalable node architecture reduces administrative costs because there are fewer nodes to build, manage, and provision - in addition to reducing the cost of interconnect fabric and software licenses. "The Altix 1330 is the solution so many users have been waiting for: a factory-integrated cluster that delivers screaming performance on all types of jobs, while offering the reliability and scalability that people have come to expect from SGI," said Bill Mannel, director, Server Marketing, Server and Platform Group, SGI. "With the Altix 1330, cost-conscious but power-hungry users worldwide now have an option that solves the lingering headaches of cluster installation and management." InfiniteStorage NAS 330: Unmatched flexibility, expandability, reliability Unlike other mid-range network-attached storage (NAS) solution appliances, the SGI InfiniteStorage NAS 330 offers features and performance usually found in more costly solutions, and is backed by SGI's renowned service and support. "Workgroups comfortable with NAS environments find they need a flexible, scalable and reliable solution that handles more than one type of data traffic, but doesn't break the budget," said John Howarth, director, SGI InfiniteStorage Solutions, SGI. "SGI's new NAS 330 addresses all these needs in an appliance that users can get up and working in just 15 to 30 minutes. This is an ideal solution for small- to medium-sized workgroups who can't afford to make storage administration a full-time job." SGI's NAS 330 delivers unmatched flexibility on multiple classes of data-intensive applications, including database, modeling and material sciences applications. The factory-configured appliance offers more than 400MB/second of throughput performance, giving users who run read and write (I/O) intensive applications a significant performance advantage compared to typical workgroup solutions. Yet users can also achieve excellent I/O performance on bandwidth-intensive applications. The result is a NAS solution that delivers performance where it is needed most. Other key advantages to the SGI NAS 330 solution include: - Pay-as-you-grow expandability: Users can scale the amount of data managed on a NAS appliance, the performance of data access, and the number of systems that use the filer - all without data migration. - Exceptional scalability: Independently scale any component from two processors, two network connections and 2.6TB of disk, up to four processors, five network connections and 16.8TB of disk in a single unit. - Interconnect flexibility: Options include Gigabit Ethernet and 4Gb FibreChannel - Simplicity and security: Users can quickly install, configure and administer the system with SGI InfiniteStorage NAS Manager, featuring a complete system summary and an array of alerts usually found on much more costly solutions. - High availability: NAS 330 offers options for high-availability cluster application fail-over and data replication. As a factory-configured NAS option for workgroup-class InfiniteStorage solutions, the NAS 330 is backed by SGI's acclaimed service and support and a one-year, next-business-day warranty on parts and labor. "We're very excited about expanding our SGI portfolio with the addition of the NAS 330. OSSI has many customers that are struggling with intensive data storage needs yet have restrictive budgets," said Carmen Marchionni, president and CEO, Open System Solutions, Inc. (OSSI), a reseller of SGI storage solutions. "Unlike many other low-cost 'point' products with fixed configurations, the NAS 330 is particularly appealing as a low-cost solution that can scale as data requirements grow. As a result, customers benefit in the near-term and far-term." Pricing and availability A 16-processor Altix 1330 node starts at under $90,000* (U.S. list). The InfiniteStorage NAS 330, expected to have great appeal with resellers and distributors, is priced from $25,599 (U.S. list) for a two-processor system with two network connections and 2.8TB of disk capacity. Additional product information may be obtained at cluster Web site and storge Web site. The SGI Altix 1330 cluster solution and SGI InfiniteStorage NAS 330 are available today through SGI sales offices and Solution Providers worldwide.