Press release

EXTEN Technologies and AIC to Provide NVMe-oF Storage Solutions Optimized for Supercomputing

0
Sponsored by Businesswire

AIC and EXTEN® Technologies have partnered to provide a dense and scalable, software-defined NVMe-oF solution with record breaking performance, advanced management, provisioning, and RAID data protection services. This disaggregated storage based on the AIC Shark server provides industry leading price performance for HPC, analytics and ML/AI applications.

The AIC Shark server is perfect for dense computation, networking, and storage scalability. Four AMD EPYC™ processors manage storage processing for up to 24 local NVMe drives in its 2U enclosure. The AIC Shark server is an ideal scale-up (add JBOFs) and scale-out (add servers) platform for high-bandwidth shared storage applications that have a variety of data processing requirements.

The EXTEN HyperDynamic® datapath running on Shark nodes creates a powerful data processing system with less than one microsecond of software overhead. This enables blistering performance with the lowest latency available. With simple striping, the 2U system achieves bandwidth of over 80GB/s. EXTEN supports both RDMA and TCP in parallel for maximum flexibility.

“Pooled NVMe storage is the most cost-effective solution for data hungry HPC applications,” said Craig Gilmore, CEO, EXTEN Technologies, Inc. “EXTEN HyperDynamic software leads the market in ease-of-use and enables resilient storage with performance density previously only available with expensive proprietary solutions.”

The EXTEN HyperDynamic software management suite offers a single REST interface to manage a cluster of NVMe-oF targets. This allows administrators to provision and manage the AIC Shark with the simplicity of a single machine, while maintaining the shared-nothing, linear scalability of NVMe-oF block storage performance. The EXTEN management framework is standards-based which ensures future-proof compatibility. Together, EXTEN software and the AIC Shark provide a perfect framework for implementing any reconfigurable, software-defined NVMe-oF solution.

“Advances in supercomputing are pushing the boundaries of storage price performance,” said Michael Liang, CEO, AIC. “AIC is pleased to partner with EXTEN and AMD to deliver high performance production-ready storage for supercomputing at a price point well below that of traditional storage solutions.”

Utilizing standard MPIO and Linux drivers, the Shark solution provides a robust storage platform built on standard tools that provides fault tolerance at both the target and drive level. EXTEN software ensures high performance resilience features including mirroring and dual parity RAID within each Shark node and volume replication across nodes without using client-side resources such as CPU, memory and I/O bandwidth.

STORAGE DISAGGREGATION

The AIC Shark, with EXTEN HyperDynamic software installed, provides highly-available, serviceable, storage that is disaggregated from compute resources. This arrangement allows storage and compute to scale independently with no performance sacrifice. EXTEN HyperDynamic storage software allows datacenter architects to select multiple hardware platforms and fabrics while maintaining a consistent user experience and the highest possible datapath performance.

AIC SHARK

The AIC Shark packs extraordinary performance in a 2U form factor with a multi-node system within the box supporting the highest performance processor, memory, storage and I/O with an architecture that is fully optimized for today’s diverse workloads and architected for further technology breakthroughs. The AIC Shark achieves incredible performance through support of the latest AMD processors with CPU TDP up to 200W. Each node of the SHARK supports up to 4TB DDR4-3200/2400 MHz in 8Rx4 DIMM slots for dramatically faster and increased memory capacity. Each node supports up to 6 NVMe (2.5”) drives with hot swap.

AIC will be exhibiting at the Supercomputing 2019 conference for high-performance computing, networking, storage, and analysis held at the Colorado Convention Center in Denver, CO from Nov 18 to Nov 22, 2019. Visit Booth 2095 to see AIC’s latest products that include integrations with EXTEN’s HyperDynamic award winning software.

About EXTEN

EXTEN Technologies (exten.io) is a pioneer in NVMe over Fabrics software applications. The EXTEN HyperDynamic storage software solution is a fully compliant protocol implementation that provides the highest performance available with less than one microsecond of overhead latency to the most demanding data centers in the world. The EXTEN architecture is the first open standards NVMe solution with no proprietary hardware or software lock-in and includes Redfish® and Swordfish™ support in its REST API offering frictionless integration to both partners and end-users.

Visit www.exten.io online to schedule a demonstration and learn more about how EXTEN HD software can solve your most pressing storage problems.

About AIC Inc.

AIC is a leading provider of both standard OTS (off-the-shelf) and OEM/ODM server and storage solutions. With expert in-house design, manufacturing and validation capabilities, AIC’s products are highly flexible and configurable to any form factor, standard or custom. AIC leads the industry with over 20 years of experience in mechanical, electronic, system-level engineering as well as a dedication to innovation and customer satisfaction. Headquartered in Taiwan, AIC has offices and operations throughout the United States, Asia and Europe. For more information, please visit: https://www.aicipc.com