DataDirect Networks Announces Broad Industry Validation of IME, World's First SSD/NVM-Enabled Workflow and Application Accelerator

DataDirect Networks Announces Broad Industry Validation of IME, World's First SSD/NVM-Enabled Workflow and Application Accelerator

IME Burst Buffer Testing and Benchmarks at Customer Sites around the Globe Show 1000x I/O Acceleration and Unprecedented Parallel Application Speedup

NEW ORLEANS, Nov. 18, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- SC14 (Booth #2539) --

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News Facts

    --  Continuing to build on the company's unparalleled leadership in HPC
        innovation, at this year's SC14, DataDirect Networks (DDN) is revealing
        broad customer adoption and latest performance testing of its Infinite
        Memory Engine (IME(TM)) burst buffer and application acceleration
        technology.
    --  Ideal for a broad range of performance-hungry HPC applications, such as
        real-time analytic processing and modeling of Big Data across Life
        Sciences, Oil and Gas, Research and Financial Services industries among
        others, where support for high bandwidth and high IOPS workloads is
        essential, DDN is placing previews of IME technology into leading HPC
        facilities around the world and currently has placed test beds in over a
        dozen Top100 sites.
    --  Planning for exascale, accelerating time to discovery and extracting
        results from massive data sets requires organizations to continually
        seek faster and more efficient solutions to provision I/O and accelerate
        applications.
    --  DDN's IME is the world's first, application-aware, non-volatile memory
        enabled   acceleration engine and buffer cache.  IME resides between the
        high-performance compute and parallel file system in an HPC environment,
        and maximizes compute utilization without crippling the storage
        back-end. By virtualizing SSDs across the entire environment into a
        single fast tier of storage, users now can take advantage of the
        declining price of commodity hardware and deliver near in-memory
        performance to accelerate I/O, reduce latency and provide greater
        operational and economic efficiency.
    --  Providing multiple advantages over any competing technology, IME
        delivers scale-out data protection with distributed erasure coding,
        seamless integration with both Lustre® and GPFS(TM) environments,
        intelligent adaptive data placement, POSIX compatibility and
        standards-based HPC application interfaces.
    --  IME is designed for HPC users looking to benefit from technology that
        delivers orders of magnitude improvements in checkpointing and
        I/O-intensive HPC application performance.
    --  Heralding a major step forward in DDN's software defined storage
        strategy, the new IME technology demonstrates DDN's focus on designing
        state-of-the-art HPC and Big Data solutions, which also include WOS®
        Object Storage technologies as well as DDN's highly optimized SFA
        storage appliances.

Tweet this: DDN changes the game: delivers 1000X I/O acceleration across HPC apps w/@DDN_Limitless Infinite Memory Engine http://bit.ly/1um6KqR

IME Decouples Physical Storage from Compute Resources to Redefine the I/O Provisioning Paradigm, Driving Increased I/O and Application Performance, Flexibility and Lower Total Cost of Storage

    --  IME enables organizations to separate the provisioning of peak and
        sustained performance requirements with up to 70 percent greater
        operational efficiency and cost savings than utilizing exclusively
        disk-based parallel file systems.
    --  Inserting IME between the compute and parallel file system removes POSIX
        semantics that bring cluster performance to its knees due to the
        proliferation of small and mal-aligned I/O that can often make up 90
        percent of the HPC workload. By shielding parallel file systems from
        fragmented I/O in cache, with IME users now can run jobs at or near line
        rate with more jobs in parallel resulting in faster time to insight.
    --  Unlike simple burst buffer technologies that have been designed for
        write-intensive, large file sequential operations such as
        checkpoint-restart, IME enables acceleration across a wide array of HPC
        applications and workloads with no application modifications required.
    --  In addition, IME enables greater flexibility and choice for end users
        due to its non-vendor-captive software-based approach.  DDN's open, no
        vendor lock-in solution provides extreme flexibility in how users can
        architect their environments and a wide selection of specialty and
        commodity hardware platforms and components.

Supporting Quotes

    --  Molly Rector, CMO, EVP Product Management and WW Marketing at DDN
"DDN's IME delivers a wide range of advances that will enable the next generation of high performance computing capabilities.  IME is a complete game changer in application acceleration, performance optimization, SSD utilization and high-performance storage.  Years of development and investment from some of the greatest minds in high performance computing have delivered IME as a transparent solution to any data-intensive HPC application.  Building on DDN's unparalleled leadership in delivering extreme performance, and with more than a dozen active test beds in use today, this announcement delivers once again on DDN's leadership in HPC."

    --  Gilles Civario, Senior Software Architect, ICHEC
"DDN's IME can transform the I/O-bound problem back into a compute-bound problem. Using IME, ICHEC is seeing a 3x acceleration of the entire Tullow Oil production application -- not just the I/O portion. Clearly there is great potential for this technology in this and other sectors."

    --  Tommy Minyard, Phd, Director of Advanced Computing Systems at TACC
"TACC is very excited to participate with DDN to perform large scale testing of DDN's IME on Stampede, currently one of the world's fastest supercomputers. This type of joint partnership testing enables TACC to prove powerful leading-edge advanced computing technologies for the open science community."

Availability

    --  IME is available in limited release today as part of DDN's IME testbed
        program.

Supporting Resources

    --  Connect with DDN at SC14
    --  More on IME
    --  Follow DDN via Blog and Twitter

DataDirect Networks

DataDirect Networks (DDN) is a leader in data center infrastructure for Big Data and Cloud Storage applications. Our data storage and processing solutions and professional services enable content-rich and high growth IT environments to achieve the highest levels of systems scalability, efficiency and simplicity. DDN enables enterprises to extract value and deliver results from their information. Our customers include the world's leading online content and social networking providers, high performance cloud and grid computing, life sciences, financial services, media production, and security and intelligence organizations. Deployed in thousands of mission critical environments worldwide, DDN's solutions have been designed, engineered and proven in the world's most scalable data centers to ensure competitive business advantage for today's information powered enterprise. For more information, go to http://www.ddn.com or call +1-800-TERABYTE (837-2298).

©2014 All rights reserved. DataDirect Networks, Inc., DDN and IME are trademarks owned by DataDirect Networks. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners

DDN Media Contact:
Dani Kenison

Sr. Director, Global Corporate Communications

Email: dkenison@ddn.com

Work: 408-990-2658

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SOURCE  DataDirect Networks

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DataDirect Networks

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