In booth 344 at this week’s SC08, a conference focusing on high performance computing, networking, storage and analysis lead to advances in research, education and commerce, LSI Corporation introduced its new Engenio DE6900 high-density SATA drive enclosure and 8Gb/s Fibre Channel (8GFC) host connectivity as enhancements to its LSI Engenio 7900 HPC storage system. Designed for compute-intensive applications and high-bandwidth workloads, the 7900 HPC storage system combines performance with enterprise-class availability and reliability features for applications requiring continuous high-speed data accessibility.
"The amount of cooled, raised floor available at commercial and government-sponsored, high-performance data centers is at a premium," said Steve Hochberg, senior director, HPC segment, LSI. "When combined with the low-cost, high-density SATA drive enclosure and 8Gb/s Fibre Channel connections, the 7900 HPC storage system provides organizations with dramatic savings on power consumption and floor space while continuing to provide high performance for data-intensive applications."
Based on sixth-generation LSI architecture, the Engenio DE6900 high-density SATA drive enclosure enhances the 7900 HPC system's ability to handle the massive data requirements of high-performance computing (HPC) applications. The DE6900 is a 4U, 19-inch rack-mountable drive enclosure capable of housing a total of sixty 3.5-inch low-cost, high-capacity SATA drives for a maximum capacity of 60TB in a single enclosure.
The new enclosure offers a 2.8X density increase compared to the current sixteen-drive Fibre Channel (FC) enclosure, enabling more drives per unit of rack space and scaling capacity to 480 SATA drives within the same footprint. The increased density translates into more than 30 percent savings on power consumption and greater than 65 percent savings on floor space to achieve similar performance and capacity. High-efficiency power supplies and variable-speed cooling fans further reduce power consumption.
The 7900 HPC offers 8GFC host connectivity. The sixteen 8GFC host interfaces enable organizations to consolidate, simplify and lower the cost of SAN infrastructure by decreasing the number of host and switch ports required to deliver equivalent or increased performance.
With the addition of 8GFC to the existing field-replaceable host interface options, including 4GFC and 20Gb/s InfiniBand interfaces, the 7900 HPC storage system is designed to quickly and easily adapt to evolving infrastructure, application and capacity requirements. Users can mix host interfaces, RAID levels (0, 1, 3, 5, 6 and 10) and disk drives within a single system -- optimizing price/performance and future proofing existing FC SAN investments.
The Engenio 7900 HPC storage system is available today through select OEM partners. The system will be on display in the LSI booth # 344 at the Supercomputing '08 (SC08) conference, which takes place November 15-21 at the Austin Convention Center.
