E4 Computer Engineering announces that University of Pisa will
become the first customer of USTI (Ultrafast Storage, Totally Integrated),
the new solution for high performance distributed block storage, based on
software-defined block storage Excelero NVMesh, Western Digital SSDs NVME Ultrastar and Mellanox Infiniband 200 Gb/s network interfaces.
Today, data has the enormous potential to open a
new world of business opportunities, but it is necessary rethinking how data
are acquired, stored, accessed and transformed. We need to create a new
approach for data storage, which can offer speed, agility and longevity.
In this context, a zero-latency storage
infrastructure is the solution. Having fast and efficient large-scale data
processing is a must for high performance solutions.
Aggregating high-performance local storage
resources often leads to suboptimal performance, to the point that the
performance of the storage itself can be compromised and computational
resources are used, thus slowing the entire system.
USTI, the new solution developed by E4 Computer
Engineering, enables efficient aggregation of NVMe flash resources on multiple
servers via the use of Excelero NVMesh without affecting the CPU,
allowing to leave the computational resources dedicated for their main purpose:
applications.
The number of nodes usable by USTI is scalable
and expandable (from a minimum of 3 to a maximum of 128), in accordance with
the required performance growth. USTI can be implemented and used within the
chosen architecture in a "native" format, or by providing block
storage functionality, or in combination with the main parallel file systems.
USTI exploits the Western Digital Ultrastar DC SN640 NVMe SSDs.
The Ultrastar DC SN640 NVMe are mainstream NVMe SSDs intended for a wide range
of applications ranging from use as a cache, to primary storage in IT and Cloud
environments.
DC SN640 is optimized to provide maximum
performance and constant QoS read latency while performing random mixed
workloads. The Ultrastar DC SN640 has, in fact, a latency of 85 µs in the capacity
of 1.6 TB.
The USTI solution is equipped with
Mellanox Infiniband network cards, which have the dual purpose of reducing
latency and increasing efficiency, improving security and simplifying
automation in the data center, to allow applications to run even faster.
Excelero NVMesh is based on the patented Remote Direct Drive Access (RDDA),
which allows direct access to data by clients, without overloading the CPU.
RDDA is also available via RoCE interfaces (RDMA over Converged Ethernet).
"USTI is the ideal solution for today's
infrastructures and applications, which need to have a latency close to
zero," says Cosimo Gianfreda, CTO of E4 Computer Engineering. "With
USTI it is possible to maximize the performance of the entire infrastructure,
using acceleration technologies synergistically, such as NVMe disks and NVMesh
software, and thus optimizing the use of all available resources".
"The Green Data Center of the University of
Pisa is implementing an innovative computing and storage architecture to
support the new scientific computing workloads (ML/DL, Data Analytics,
Genomics...)" says Maurizio Davini, CTO of the University of
Pisa. "USTI allowed us to complete the GPU Computing infrastructure in
the best possible way and proved to be an ideal solution due to its ease of
implementation and exceptional performance."
"When designing USTI together with the E4
team, I was once more impressed by how professional and passionate the E4 team
is about building innovative solutions of the highest quality. I am sure that
customers will appreciate USTI for its game-changing performance and will
thoroughly enjoy working with the E4 team to deploy and optimize their storage resources.
E4 consistently designs the best solution for any given challenge." - Sven Breuner,
Field CTO, Excelero
"We participated with great enthusiasm in
the E4 Computer Engineering project for the new Green Data Center of the
University of Pisa. The USTI solution fully meets the requirements that data
center customers need in the current zettabyte era. Our Ultrastar DC SN640 is a
perfect complement to this solution" says Davide Villa, Emeai Business Development
Director, Western Digital. "The hardware and software components of
a state-of-the-art data center solution such as USTI must interact
intelligently and holistically to achieve optimal levels of performance and,
together with E4 Computer Engineering and its partners, we have achieved this."