Commercial HPC

The Ontario Institute for Cancer, Saudi Aramco, Total and Synopsys rely on S2A Extreme Storage for the scalability, performance, density, and power efficiency they need to store and manage vast amounts of data used for data-intensive research, 3-D and 4-D modeling, seismic analysis, data mining and large-scale simulation.

Although High Performance Computing (HPC) is often associated with scientific research in government and academic laboratories, corporate enterprises are applying the technology and infrastructure developed for those environments for their own data-intensive applications. With a proven record in 48 of the top 100 supercomputing environments, the S2A Extreme Storage platform's superior performance, scaling, and volumetric density make it the data infrastructure backbone of choice for the most demanding data-intensive applications.

Winner of the HPCwire's Editors' Choice Award for Best HPC Storage Product and Technology, DataDirect Networks' innovative S2A technology enables commercial high-performance computing users in diverse industries to store and process vast amounts of data while reducing storage footprint and power requirements.

Energy

With continuing demand for oil and gas, energy companies use advanced computational techniques to determine whether to invest in a particular site. Across the industry, upstream petroleum exploration produces petabytes of new, unique seismic data on a daily basis. This data is relayed from land and sea acquisition operations to seismic processing data centers which in turn analyze and interpret the acquired 3D and 4D seismic datasets to determine if the surveyed areas possess sub-surface oil or gas deposits.

As data sets grow larger, seismic processing applications have been parallelized to benefit from low-cost commodity computing architectures. Conventional storage systems cannot handle the performance and capacity scaling requirements for all of the exploration-related applications including, 3D and 4D seismic analysis, reservoir extraction simulation, combustion and emissions modeling, nor the data backup and archiving of the enormous growth of raw and processed seismic data.

DDN's eighth generation S2A platform enables multiple applications to run simultaneously in parallel and provides extreme performance and capacity, managing up to 2.4 petabytes in only two floor tiles while delivering sustained throughput of up to 6 gigabytes per second for both writes and reads, per appliance.

Additionally, the S2A is the only storage platform that writes data as fast as it reads it, with guaranteed QoS, which translates into consistently predictable performance enabling you to more quickly locate potentially profitable sites and expedite time-to-production and profitability.

Highlights

• Delivers extreme performance beyond 240 GB/s and scalable capacity
• Reduces storage footprint and power requirements
• Provides high-speed host connectivity
• Lowers cost of online archives, backup and recovery

Financial Services

Market performance is directly linked to a financial manager's ability to acquire, analyze and transact data faster than the competition. Financial modeling and Monte Carlo simulations leveraging massive amounts of real-time and public, proprietary, and internal data can help firms to better assess and balance reward and risk in investments and optimize portfolio performance.

As financial applications take advantage of scalable cluster computing architectures and high-performance data networks, storage systems need to enable, not bottleneck, the computing system. Additionally, regulatory requirements substantially extend financial market information lifecycles. Storage managers require systems which can store and maintain data for years, and retrieve it at a moment's notice.

DataDirect Networks' eighth generation S2A platform presents a common storage foundation for both real-time market data processing and analysis as well as long-term cost effective nearline and backup storage. The S2A platform enables multiple applications to run simultaneously in parallel and provides extreme performance and capacity, managing up to 2.4 petabytes in only two floor tiles while delivering sustained throughput of up to 6 gigabytes per second for both writes and reads, per appliance.

Additionally, the S2A is the only storage platform that writes data as fast as it reads it, with guaranteed QoS, which translates into consistently predictable performance enabling you to make more timely risk/reward analyses, make quicker and more accurate market decisions, and maximize portfolio profitability.

Highlights

• Delivers extreme performance and maintains QoS for real-time data
• Reduces storage footprint and power requirements
• Provides rapid backup and recovery
• Prevents data loss
• Lowers cost of long-term online archives for compliance

Design & Simulation

Manufacturers across a wide range of industries--from electronics, to automotive, aerospace, aircraft, and defense--face continual competitive pressure to innovate while having to meet product development deadlines and budget constraints. To meet these goals, companies leverage a variety of computational and data-intensive tools for design and simulation, including EDA, CAD, CAE, finite element analysis, computational fluid dynamics and 3D modeling.

The massive amounts of data generated in design, simulation, and testing of new products, much of it in unstructured large files, must be quickly accessed and shared among engineering groups as well as archived for future use and for regulatory compliance. Conventional storage architectures, optimized for transaction-based database access become bottlenecks as they are unable to efficiently handle unstructured and large data files in these commercial HPC environments.

DataDirect Networks' eighth generation S2A platform presents a common storage foundation for the design and simulation phases as well as long-term cost effective nearline storage. The S2A platform enables multiple applications to run simultaneously in parallel and provides extreme performance and capacity, managing up to 2.4 petabytes in only two floor tiles while delivering sustained throughput of up to 6 gigabytes per second for both writes and reads, per appliance.

Additionally, the S2A is the only storage platform that writes data as fast as it reads it, with guaranteed QoS, which translates into consistently predictable performance enabling you to reduce design and simulation time to help reduce engineering costs and accelerate product development, increase collaboration and productivity across design teams, enhance product lifecycle management, and cost-effectively archive models and result files.

Highlights

• Delivers extreme performance beyond 240 GB/s and scalable capacity
• Reduces storage footprint and power requirements
• Enables collaborative file sharing
• Provides rapid backup and recovery
• Lowers cost of long-term online archives of models and result files