LSI showcases new HPC storage system

LSI's XBB2 promises ultra-high levels of data availability

Network and storage vendor LSI unveiled its latest storage system for high-performance computing (HPC) environments at the International Supercomputing Conference in Dresden.

LSI said its seventh-generation XBB2 architecture, gives a bandwidth on sustained reads and writes of 6.4GB/s and 5.4GB/s respectively.

The system also has fully redundant components and data paths, automated failover, drive health monitoring, controller cache mirroring and hardware-assisted redundant array of inexpensive disks (RAID) 6. RAID 6 is important for high availability storage systems, since it allows the array to keep going even in the event of two drives failing.

LSI's senior director for HPC Steve Hochberg said “In HPC environments, it is no longer enough to provide storage with high bandwidth alone. Firms need storage delivering the highest levels of data availability."

The initial release will allow firms to scale the system to 256 fibre channel (FC) or serial ATA (SATA) drives, with further RAID options being levels 0, 1,3,5 and 10. Engenio also offers field-replaceable host interface options, including 4Gbit/s Fibre Channel (FC) and 20Gbit/s InfiniBand connectivity.

As well as allowing customers to mix host interfaces, RAID levels and drive types in a single system, LSI are also touting the Engenio's ability to adapt to future HPC advances, saying that subsequent releases can scale to 480 drives and will support 8Gbit/s FC and 40Gbit/s InfiniBand connectivity.

Engenio's 7900 HPC storage system is available now through selected LSI OEM partners.