SGI's new NAS box caters for storage sharing
PrintNexis 9000 combines InfiniBand and RDMA storage
Posted in Enterprise, 14th November 2007 20:58 GMT
Free whitepaper – What Exchange can't do - and Dell can
SGI is launching an InfiniBand-based RDMA storage device to its freshly announced Nexis family of NAS storage systems.
The Nexis 9000 is a 5U system built with high-performance computing in mind. It holds 48 drives in four enclosures, for a maximum of 144TB of raw capacity. The hardware is powered by up to eight Intel Dual Cores and has a max system memory of 128GB.
Nexis 9000
By combining remote direct-memory access and the Infiniband protocol, SGI aims to reduce CPU overhead and increase throughput from disk to application. That's likely to appeal to those seeking to consolidate multiple departments onto a single NAS platform and increase bandwidth.
"With RDMA over InfiniBand, we're pushing scalability to up to 1GB per second write and 3GB per second read performance with significant improvement planned in the future," said Raj Das, veep of SGI storage.
SGI is pitching the hardware as a performance alternative to costly Fibre Channel — offering InfiniBand, 10Gigabit Ethernet and Gigabit Ethernet protocols on the device.
The company sees the 9000 as its pinnacle platform for consolidation of shared data assets in business and scientific fields, but principally for digital media servers.
Nexis 9000 specs are available here (heads up, it's a PDF). SGI will be dropping the device onto the market in December. ®
Analyst Keynote: The Register Agile Data Center Summit
Managing desktop software for fun and profit
Enhancing retail operations with unified communications
New storage architectures make SSDs more cost-effective
Sign up, sign up for The Register IT security newsletter
Microsoft's Windows 7 price gamble - and why it's flawed
Managing Desktop Software for fun and profit
Intel's flash new SSDs hit by bugs