Xinnor and Western Digital Introduce High-Performance BeeGFS Storage Solution

May 26, 2023

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Xinnor and Western Digital have partnered to present a high-performance storage solution for high-performance computing (HPC) environments. The solution combines Western Digital’s OpenFlex Data24 NVMe-oF Storage Platform with Xinnor’s xiRAID software.

The collaboration addresses the challenges of designing well-balanced storage systems in HPC environments. By leveraging Xinnor’s lightweight software RAID, xiRAID, and Western Digital’s OpenFlex Data24 NVMe-oF Storage Platform, the solution enables organizations to achieve low-cost, high-performance, and highly available storage that scales with IO-intensive workloads.

The solution deploys BeeGFS, a hardware-independent parallel file system known for its performance and ease of use. BeeGFS, together with xiRAID and the OpenFlex Data24 NVMe-oF Storage Platform, provides a scalable and efficient storage solution for HPC clusters.

The OpenFlex Data24 NVMe-oF Storage Platform, utilizing the NVMe-oF protocol, enables storage disaggregation from compute resources, ensuring high availability and accessibility across multiple applications and hosts.

With xiRAID, users can benefit from fast and effective data access through high-performance RAID configurations using NVMe and SAS/SATA SSDs. xiRAID ensures data protection, high availability, and minimal downtime, crucial for data-intensive systems and large server infrastructures.

The joint solution demonstrates that by replacing buddy mirroring with more cost and resources efficient xiRAID RAID5, the user will gain extra capacity as well as performance.

IOR Test Results (Gb/s) BeeGFS performance on Non-RAID volumes (without Buddy Mirror). Not protected in case of drive failure BeeGFS performance on Non-RAID volumes with Buddy Mirror BeeGFS performance on Xinnor RAID5 volumes (without Buddy Mirror)
Read 45 45 42
Write 30 7.7 24

By adopting this solution, organizations can minimize installation costs, implement high-performance high-availability file systems, and accelerate time-to-market for new application services. The solution, based on NVMe-oF and Composable Disaggregated Infrastructure (CDI) technologies, enables a flexible and cost-efficient storage model.

The collaboration between Xinnor and Western Digital introduces a robust, high-performance, and easy-to-manage storage solution, meeting the evolving demands of IO-intensive workloads in HPC environments. With BeeGFS, xiRAID, and OpenFlex Data24 NVMe-oF Storage Platform, organizations can unlock new levels of performance and efficiency in their storage infrastructure.

Solution brief is available at Western Digital’s website here. For more details you can also check the white paper.

ABOUT WESTERN DIGITAL

Headquartered in San Jose, California, Western Digital Corporation is an American manufacturer of computer drives and data storage solutions. The company designs, produces, and markets data technology products, such as data storage devices, cloud storage services, and data center systems. With a lengthy history as an integrated circuit manufacturer and storage products provider, Western Digital is among the leading manufacturers of computer hard disk drives, solid-state drives, and flash memory devices.

ABOUT THINKPARQ

ThinkParQ GmbH strives to create and develop the fastest, most flexible, and most stable solutions for every performance-oriented environment. Established in 2014 as a spinoff from the Fraunhofer Center for High-Performance Computing, ThinkParQ drives the research and development of BeeGFS, and works closely with system integrators to create turn-key solutions. Visit http://www.thinkparq.com for further information.