High Performance Computing

High performance clusters running technical applications place extreme demands on storage systems. Performance requirements are typically in the multigigabyte-per-second range, and capacity can scale into the petabyte class. High performance computing (HPC) applications such as seismic processing, digital image creation and rendering, electronic design automation, genomic research, media hosting, and other data-intensive applications demand the ability to scale storage capacity and performance to extreme levels while reducing management complexity.

The Solution
The NetApp Data ONTAP® GX system is a highly scalable, multinode storage solution that exceeds the demands of most HPC applications for extreme performance, management simplicity, and excellent reliability. The system is based on the Data ONTAP GX operating system and two or more FAS system nodes, and performance is scaled linearly. Clustered file system technology, delivered via the FlexVol® High Performance Option (HPO), enables extreme levels of throughput, even for a single file or volume.

Benefits

• Highest performance. Data ONTAP GX systems meet the performance demands of high performance computing environments. As nodes are added, performance scales linearly, resulting in multigigabyte levels of throughput. With FlexVol HPO, volumes are striped across any or all of the nodes in the system, enabling gigabytes-per-second throughput to be delivered for a single file or volume.
• Simplest to manage. Data ONTAP GX systems provide a new level of management simplicity for scale-out storage by using the global namespace capability. This feature enables data movement between controllers or different storage tiers; all clients can view all storage and physical storage changes that are fully transparent to the users and applications. In addition, no client-code software is required, because communications are handled through standard NFS and CIFS protocols.
• Highly reliable. Data ONTAP GX systems deliver excellent reliability relative to other scale-out alternatives. Data ONTAP GX leverages the same core system software (WAFL®) that has been proven in over 94,000 installations and similarly leverages other proven technologies from the widely installed NetApp Data ONTAP 7G. In addition, key high-availability features such as double parity RAID (RAID-DP™) and transparent node failover provide robust data availability.