Smart Data Centers Feature Editorial

According to company sources, the Voltaire (News - Alert)-Supermicro RapidStorage Appliance serves as a building block for scalable high performance storage systems capable of delivering millions of input/output operations per second (IOPS) and hundred times faster access time than traditional storage systems.

The RapidStorage Appliance comprises of Supermicro high-density Double-Sided Storage servers and Voltaire Storage Accelerator or VSA software.  The Voltaire high-speed 10 GbE or InfiniBand switches enable multiple appliances to be interconnected to form a highly scalable and unified system. This has several high-speed links that serve data to clients in parallel at remarkable speeds.

In a press release, Asaf Somekh (News - Alert), vice president of marketing for Voltaire, said, “Storage I/O bottlenecks present a major challenge for high performance, data-intensive environments that, until now, required big IT budgets to attempt to eliminate them. With the Voltaire-Supermicro RapidStorage Appliance, customers can finally get incredibly fast storage access and colossal scalability at a reasonable price point.”

Tau Leng, PhD, general manager of Marketing and HPC solutions at Supermicro, commented that this solution is very advantageous as a high-performance storage solution and it enables customers to deploy petabytes of fast storage in just a few racks.

Leng added, “Our SC417 Double-Sided Storage features exceptional density and accessibility, which enables the RapidStorage Appliance to not only deliver excellent performance, but also offer a unique solution to the storage market.”

Voltaire sources revealed that the VSA software features a unique storage acceleration and clustering solution that provides ultra-fast remote block storage access over 10GbE and InfiniBand fabrics. VSA software uses iSCSI or iSER (iSCSI RDMA Extension) capabilities for increasing throughput and also process numerous transactions in parallel with less overhead.

Supermicro’s latest Double-Sided Storage server SC417 offers support up to 43TB of hot-swap SAS2 storage capacity in 4U. Previously only 48 drives were provided in the front and now Supermicro has added 24 more hot-swap drives in the rear of the SC417 to increase the storage capacity significantly.