Qualstar releases prototype enterprise class library offering with Sony Imaging

Qualstar Corp., provider of data storage systems, has developed a prototype enterprise class library solution with Sony Imaging Products & Solutions.

The highly scalable enterprise class library solution leverages Qualstar’s expertise and experience in designing efficient robotic-based storage systems. Utilizing Sony’s Optical Disc Archive Generation 3 technology, a single library will scale from 4.7 PB up to 50 PB. It can scale out to multi-library cluster configurations capable of managing hundreds of petabytes of archive data.

“Today’s supercomputing environments need high capacity, scalable data storage solutions to archive data for a longer period of time,” said Arun Vaishampayan, Qualstar’s vice president of global sales. “Sony’s Optical Disc Archive Generation 3 storage platform fulfills the needed requirements of this market.”

“We are delighted with the progress of this project,” said Steven N. Bronson, CEO of Qualstar. “We believe the jointly developed product will serve the needs of our valued customers and open new markets for optical devices.”

Qualstar works on a prototype enterprise class library solution with Sony Imaging

Qualstar Corp., provider of data storage systems, has developed a prototype enterprise class library solution with Sony Imaging Products & Solutions.

The highly scalable enterprise class library solution leverages Qualstar’s expertise and experience in designing efficient robotic-based storage systems. Utilizing Sony’s Optical Disc Archive Generation 3 technology, a single library will scale from 4.7 PB up to 50 PB. It can scale out to multi-library cluster configurations capable of managing hundreds of petabytes of archive data.

Through a wholly owned subsidiary, Qualstar also provides high efficiency and high density power supplies under the N2Power brand. Its N2Power power supply products provide compact and efficient power conversion for a wide variety of industries and applications, including but not limited to telecom, networking, broadcast, industrial, lighting, gaming, and test equipment.

“Today’s supercomputing environments need high capacity, scalable data storage solutions to archive data for a longer period of time,” said Arun Vaishampayan, Qualstar’s Vice President of Global Sales. “Sony’s Optical Disc Archive Generation 3 storage platform fulfills the needed requirements of this market.”

“We are delighted with the progress of this project,” said Steven N. Bronson, CEO of Qualstar. “We believe the jointly developed product will serve the needs of our valued customers and open new markets for optical devices.”

Panasas releases PanFS on the ActiveStor Ultra Storage System to enhance performance, efficiency

Panasas announced that its re-engineered PanFS parallel file system, delivered on the Panasas ActiveStor Ultra appliance, is now shipping and in early deployment at Sumitomo Metal Mining and the University of Minnesota Supercomputing Institute. Built for price/performance and engineered for manageability, the new generation of PanFS is integrated with commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware to deliver the fastest parallel file system at any price point.

The system is also deployed at a large U.S.-based aerospace manufacturer, at the world’s largest provider of subsurface data to the energy sector, and at a U.S.-based global security and aerospace company. 

The next generation of PanFS on ActiveStor Ultra offers unlimited performance scaling in 4 GB/s building blocks, utilizing multi-tier intelligent data placement to maximize storage performance by placing metadata on low-latency NVMe SSDs, small files on high IOPS SSDs and large files on high-bandwidth HDDs. The system’s balanced node architecture optimizes networking, CPU, memory and storage capacity to prevent hot spots and bottlenecks, ensuring consistently high performance regardless of workload.

The PanFS parallel file system is delivered on Panasas ActiveStor Ultra, a turnkey appliance that provides the extreme performance, enterprise-grade reliability and manageability required to process large and complex datasets. These datasets are associated with HPC workloads and emerging applications such as AI, precision medicine, autonomous driving, and augmented and virtual reality. 

ActiveStor Ultra goes from dock to data in one day, providing a plug-and-play solution that is easy to install, manage and grow. With ActiveStor Ultra’s modular architecture and building-block design, enterprises can start small and scale linearly by scaling metadata performance, bandwidth and capacity independently and without limitations.

“The re-engineered PanFS returns Panasas to the ranks of top-performing HPC data storage systems on the market, while maintaining the frustration-free storage experience our customers have come to expect and value,” said Faye Pairman, chief executive officer at Panasas. “With the new PanFS on ActiveStor Ultra, our customers can take advantage of the industry’s leading price/performance in a storage appliance that maximizes simplicity, boosts reliability, and delivers the lowest total cost of ownership.”

“The advanced-research computing infrastructure deployed at the Minnesota Supercomputing Institute has used Panasas data storage for more than 12 years,” said James Wilgenbusch, Ph.D., director of research computing, office of the vice president for research, University of Minnesota. “Ours is a truly mixed workload environment, and we value the ease and speed with which Panasas handles multi-discipline workloads such as CFD, CAE, computational physics and chemistry, and bioinformatics, to name a few. The new PanFS on ActiveStor Ultra expands on that tradition by delivering an appliance built for unlimited linear performance scalability at a highly attractive price point.”

“When we moved to a large cluster system we decided to deploy a parallel storage solution that delivered operational simplicity in addition to limitless scalability of capacity and performance,” said Toshiki Kishimoto, general manager, Computer-Aided Engineering and Development Dept., Technology Division, Sumitomo Metal Mining. “PanFS on ActiveStor Ultra offers us an environment that doesn’t require tuning to maintain peak performance, automates common maintenance and recovery tasks, and in case of questions, we have immediate access to support expertise from highly-qualified storage professionals.”

Kingston Technology releases NVMe SSD QoS benchmarks for HPC architectures

Kingston Digital Inc., a flash memory affiliate of Kingston Technology Company, demonstrated on Wednesday its server DRAM and latest NVMe PCIe Flash solutions for high performance computing (HPC) at Supercomputing 2019 (SC19). Supercomputing is an international conference that brings together the high-performance computing community. 

Kingston will demonstrate the consistent data performance and reliability of its forthcoming DC1000M U.2 NVMe SSD, purpose-built for data-intensive enterprise workloads and HPC architectures at the forefront of new artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) applications.

During SC19, Kingston and Madison Cloud will demonstrate Private MultiCloud Storage (PMCS) architecture, providing a unified storage fabric for cloud and on-premise installations. 

Designed to keep data close to the Cloud without actually putting it in the Cloud, PMCS deploys the same storage platform wherever you are, providing the products and support that system builders need to move at the speed of Cloud. The two companies will showcase how users can run real-time MultiCloud workloads from a PMCS server in a MultiCloud architecture, built with Kingston DRAM, SATA and NVMe SSDs, providing consistent performance and a wide range of enterprise class features compared to cloud-native storage products.

Kingston will further demonstrate specific architectural advancements for Big Data and ML applications with the upcoming DC1000M U.2 NVMe SSD and recently launched DC500 SATA data center SSDs. 

The big data workflows validate possibilities for 10-bay NVMe server configurations while delivering 5.8 million IOPS at a sustained bandwidth of 23.8Gb/s. Kingston’s third demo presents ML application learning by naming thousands of satellite images per second as the DC1000M alleviates storage bottlenecks, accelerates large data sets and optimizes NVIDIA GPU performance for ML.

“Today’s supercomputers are powering a multitude of applications that are at the forefront of progress ― from oil and gas exploration to weather predictions, financial markets to developing new technologies,” said Keith Schimmenti, enterprise SSD business manager, Kingston. “These HPC applications require far greater consistency of performance and IO delivery. We are proud to share how Kingston’s solutions are an integral part of the stack behind the next breakthroughs in computing, providing the performance required in the world’s most extreme computing environments and applications.”

KIOXIA’s PCIe 4.0 enterprise NVMe SSDs strengthens storage performance; achieves PCI-SIG compliance and NVMe certification

KIOXIA America Inc. (formerly Toshiba Memory America, Inc.), the U.S.-based subsidiary of KIOXIA Corp., announced Wednesday that its lineup of PCIe 4.0 NVMe enterprise solid state drives (SSDs) has achieved PCI-SIG compliance for PCIe 4.0 and University of New Hampshire InterOperability Laboratory (UNH-IOL) certification. 

KIOXIA’s CM6 Series passed interoperability tests at the August 2019 PCI-SIG Compliance Workshop – that includes official PCIe 4.0 specification tests. KIOXIA America will be on hand at Supercomputing 2019 later this month to showcase new levels of flash performance enabled by its CM6 Series SSDs. 

KIOXIA develops PCIe 4.0 NVM Express SSDs and continues to push the limits of flash storage performance. The CM6 Series brings planned performance improvements of three times over its PCIe 3.0 predecessors and is 12 times faster than SATA drives. KIOXIA’s lineup of Gen4 PCIe SSDs also includes the CD6 Series, which is targeted to cloud and scale-out environments.

The PCIe 4.0 NVMe enterprise SSDs utilizes KIOXIA’s 96-layer BiCS FLASH 3D flash memory, PCIe 2x2 or 1x4 lane configuration options, targeted transfer rates up to 6,900 megabytes per second; and supports SFF-TA-1001 (also known as U.3) operation with universal backplanes for simplified customer use with SAS, SATA and NVMe SSDs.

KIOXIA was at Microsoft Ignite earlier this month to demonstrate the CM6 Series running in a Microsoft Azure hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) platform with Quanta Cloud Technologies – and enabling twice performance gains over a PCIe 3.0 solution. 

“We were able to show that our CM6 Series SSDs are capable of pushing SSD sequential read performance to over 55 gigabytes per second (GB/s) across eight drives – nearly 7GB/s per SSD – and we’re not done yet. KIOXIA will continue to push the performance envelope for our customers,” noted Alvaro Toledo, vice president of SSD marketing and product planning for KIOXIA America.

PCI-SIG hosts Compliance Workshops several times a year in various locations worldwide, giving members the opportunity to test and validate their products before entering the field. Compliance testing is completed against both PCI-SIG maintained systems and other manufacturers of PCI products. 

As the key testing and certification lab for NVMe technology and software, the UNH-IOL provides conformance and interoperability testing across various operating systems, drivers, and hardware platforms, as well as PCIe SSDs and PCIe-enabled servers. “The SSD market is quickly moving to NVM Express technology, and standards compliance is critical to ensure smooth adoption,” added Toledo.

Cortical.io releases initial application of real-time semantic supercomputing based on natural language understanding

Cortical.io announced Tuesday debut of a new class of high-performance enterprise applications based on “Semantic Supercomputing,” which combines Cortical.io AI-based NLU software inspired by neuroscience with hardware acceleration to create new solutions to understand and process streams of natural language content at massive scale in real time.

The first application of Semantic Supercomputing, a Messaging Classification Appliance that can filter, classify and route streams of messages in real time by understanding the semantic content – the meaning and intent of the messages – was unveiled Tuesday at Xilinx Developer Forum (XDF) Europe keynote session in The Hague.

The Cortical.io approach to NLU is inspired by the latest findings on the way the brain processes information. This approach provides advantages over traditional machine learning methods and helps businesses solve many open NLU challenges like meaning-based filtering of terabytes of unstructured text data, real-time topic detection in social media, or semantic search over millions of documents across languages.

Building on the alliance announced with Xilinx at last month’s at XDF Americas in San Jose, Cortical.io is developing this first of a series of FPGA-based appliances powered by Xilinx Alveo accelerator cards. Cortical.io also announced it is partnering with Supermicro (SMCI), vendor of enterprise computing, storage, networking solutions and green computing technology, to deliver the email solution on a pre-loaded server. 

The appliance will enable enterprises to filter and route massive volumes of email messages in real time with high precision and recall based on the meaning of the message. The product will be available in the first quarter of next year.

“Ever-increasing unstructured data is overwhelming the world and the available processing power and current statistical approaches to deal with it,” said Francisco Webber, co-founder and CEO of Cortical.io. “We are taking the concept of supercomputing to the next level with the introduction of Semantic Supercomputing and the ability to deliver real-time processing of semantic content.”

“The goal is to reduce the wasted efforts of handling irrelevant or misdirected emails by first line business operations – including support, sales, purchasing,” said Cortical.io CMO Steve Levine. “The appliance will be able to handle a massive volume of messages daily in real time.”

Enterprise system administrators will be able to train the system and customize the filtering and routing based on a small number of sample emails. Once trained, the appliance works across multiple languages (English, Spanish, German, Portuguese, Cantonese, Arabic, French, Italian, Mandarin Chinese, Dutch).

“The demand for real-time AI services has never been greater and, together with Cortical.io and Supermicro, we’re excited to be building a solution for solving the incredible processing challenges of real-time Natural Language Understanding on a massive scale,” said Adam Scraba, director of marketing, Data Center Group, at Xilinx.

“Supermicro’s proven and extensive server portfolio when combined with Xilinx Alveo accelerators and the Cortical.io AI-based NLU software, delivers a sophisticated enterprise platform to address the growing data explosion, especially email,” said Don Clegg, senior vice president, Worldwide Sales, Supermicro.

This is the first instance of using the power of semantic supercomputing. 

“Our goal is to make possible the broad implementation and deployment of AI solutions for automating business processes and solving the most challenging use cases that depend on human understanding, decision making and execution,” added Cortical.io CEO Webber.