SoftIron Ltd., the leader in task-specific data center appliances, announced their selection by the Sandia National Laboratories Vanguard program, to provide supplemental file and object storage for its ARM-based Stria high performance computing cluster. The Stria system supports the Astra Supercomputer as a development system for preparing software releases and codes to be used on the petascale Astra system. SoftIron's HyperDrive Storage appliances are purpose-built to maximize the performance of open-source Ceph storage software, enabling simple and efficient deployment at scale.

SoftIron has provided a petabyte-scale deployment of its US-designed and manufactured HyperDrive storage solution to support the tier two storage needs of the Stria system in Sandia's Vanguard program. The program's purpose is to evaluate the feasibility of emerging high-performance computing technologies for use in platforms supporting the U.S. Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration's mission: to maintain and enhance the safety, security, and effectiveness of the U.S. nuclear stockpile. The deployment includes SoftIron's HyperDrive Storage Manager, an intuitive online management tool that radically simplifies the management and usability of open source Ceph. It provides a powerful and simple interface for system administrators to remotely manage their HyperDrive storage clusters as an integrated software and hardware system, eliminating the need for "command line warriors."

 

"Sandia continually endeavors to push the envelope of HPC system technologies and SoftIron's approach to software-defined storage aligns well with that vision. Their task-specific hardware demonstrates the purposeful design and use of ARM-based processors for lean but responsive storage services," said Matthew Curry, Ph.D., Senior Member of Technical Staff at Sandia National Laboratories. "SoftIron is able to deliver a fully supported Ceph solution with an ARM technology base, supporting the needs for the advanced application exploration activities on the Stria system. SoftIron's HyperDrive was put through a rigorous analysis, which delivered the expected performance and efficiency for experimental workloads on the ARM-based Stria cluster." 

"Being selected by the Sandia Vanguard program to take part in their mission to expand and advance high -performance computing technology gives further validation to SoftIron's position that hardware really does matter in the software-defined data center," said Phil Straw, CEO of SoftIron. "We have uniquely taken a task-specific approach that builds around open source, software-defined packages to create powerful and elegant data center solutions that maximize capabilities and minimize complexity. Whether the need is for highly reliable and performance efficient storage involved with a national security application, or an enterprise needing the speed and efficiency to operate with the power and reliability of a hyperscaler, SoftIron has the tools to deliver a scale-out solution that rewrites the enterprise data center blueprint."