ExERA
ExERA is an on-premise, purpose-built, engineered data management solution specifically developed for HPC customers. The design principal centers around an architecture that delivers frictionless scalability in 3 dimensions: Throughput, IOPS and Capacity. ExERA is a robust, scalable architecture that provides flexibility and future-proofing asthe HPC data management and scalability requirements change dramatically over the next few years. Migrating to ExERA today will dramatically collapse workspace island infrastructure and position our customers to meet the challenges of rapidly growing archive capacity requirements at the Exabyte level.
ExERA is purpose-built and engineered solution that delivers:
- Scalable IO throughput to support current and future requirements.
- Automatic movement of data to the right archive storage target, based on policies and budgetary considerations.
- Operational resilient environment that is self-managing and self-healing.
- High volume, bi-directional data movement from and to the HPC primary scratch storage and secondary processing to the workspace and archive layers to support the future AI and machine learning requirements.
- Future proofing by leveraging commercial off-the-shelf (COTS), industry standard based architecture.
One of the ExERA architecture design goals is the ability to create a cloud archive across multiple HPC sites allowing the seamless movement/sharing of datasets as easily as managing data at a local site. ExERA allows customers to establish both private and public clouds to meet different operational requirements.
ExERA is about providing choices and the flexibility to meet individual customer requirements. However, these options and choices do not require performance trade offs. ExERA in fact, offers tremendous performance to meet the throughput, IOPS and scalability challenges. For example, our workspace can support 10s of PBs and can easily support a 100GB/sec of ingest and recall processing and can scale from smaller to larger. Our use of flash for all the metadata provides msec access to internal file and object structures. Our use of flash for all tiny and small files, think 100TB of data space, provides us with the ability to support billions and billions of files with fantastic IOPS performance.
Throughput:
• ExERA is the only solution that offers a way to save substantial dollars by collapsing or shrinking away at least one or more, secondary and post processing workspace infrastructure(s). Marketplace examples are Hadoop storage, commodity storage, campaign storage, AI storage, visualization storage, Big Data storage, Data Analytics, Deep Learning storage and others. One or more of these high performance IO and large storage islands could be removed by utilizing various layers of the ExERA solution.
IOPs:
• ExERA’s high performance Workspace Layer is supported today by two market leading parallel file systems, Lustre and Spectrum Scale (GPFS). The benefit of the ExERA architecture is that if, for workload and processing requirements, this configuration needs to be enhanced, then by simply adding additional controllers both the throughput and disk capacity can be increased. Leveraging the Workspace Layer our customers might be able to collapse some of the secondary processing IO storage islands currently installed.
Capacity:
• ExERA offers three main archive layers, disk, tape and cloud. ExERA’s high capacity Disk Archive Layer is supported by an enterprise-class Object Storage system. The benefit of Object Storage is that additional throughput and capacity can be added within minutes to meet growing workload requirements. By leveraging the Disk Archive Layer, customers may be able to collapse some of the bulk storage islands like Commodity and Campaign. ExERA’s high capacity Tape Archive Layer is supported by all industry-leading tape libraries: IBM, Oracle, Spectra and Quantum and allows for reuse of existing tape infrastructure. The benefit of tape is that it is still the lowest cost per GB in the industry and allows for up to an Exabyte or more of capacity with current technologies.
