Advances in Network-Attached Storage (NAS) Harness the Digital Data Explosion

SGI© InfiniteStorage NEXIS Family Delivers High-Performance and Scalability with Enterprise-Class Ease of Management

The world has accepted the realities of the information age, but businesses and organizations continue to search for improved data management approaches. Compromises have been required, driven by the costs of storage, storage management platforms, and operations overhead for deployment and system administration. SGI recently introduced a new family of NAS platforms, and as a result, more businesses can take advantage of the cost efficiencies of shared storage without giving up the ability to expand while at the same time simplifying the day-to-day management of storage.

"Customers have stated they need better performance and reduced complexity from their NAS solutions, and the new NEXIS family is a direct and powerful response to that need," said Bo Ewald, CEO of SGI. "In the performance portion of the enterprise-the revenue-generating side of the business where companies conduct their R&D-we see growing demand for compute and storage solutions that deliver HPC performance and scalability. But customers also want us to make those solutions easier than ever to use. That's what we've done with NEXIS-a high-performance, scalable NAS family with enterprise-class ease of management."

The family's launch is extremely timely, bringing high-performance, scalability, and high availability options to customers that want to protect investments in information assets for years to come.

Start Small and Expand as Needed

The SGI solutions are modular and expandable for long-life operation, and a choice of configurations provides the flexibility to match a platform to the user needs. Users won't be forced to replace an SGI NAS platform when they need to add capacity or upgrade to a newer storage technology. The family efficiently scales storage capacity, file directory size, and performance, and simplifies the non-disruptive expansion of storage capacity with automated discovery and configuration guidance. High capacity and file count scalability provide the foundation for seamless file directory growth, reducing the need for multiple directory configurations and associated management complexities.

Appliance-Like Ease of Management

The new SGI Appliance Manager software keeps cost of ownership affordable for a broad range of vertical markets and businesses. Fully integrated with each platform, SGI Appliance Manager provides a graphical-user interface for optimizing storage resources, managing growth and allowing the set-up of base NAS configurations in less than 20 minutes. The single, unified storage management interface of the Appliance Manager helps to automate storage asset discovery and provides configuration guidance for fast and easy initial deployment and future storage capacity expansion. Granular resolution guidance and storage utilization tools help reduce manageability costs and maximize storage efficiencies.

The software gives the SGI InfiniteStorage NEXIS NAS Family the ease of an appliance but without the limitations and restrictions. By eliminating complexity, customers can more efficiently manage the exponential data growth typical in so many of today's commercial and digital media application workloads.

Uncompromised Performance

At the heart of the SGI InfiniteStorage NEXIS NAS family is SGI's highly efficient XFS© file system, repurposed for NAS appliance simplicity. Unlike alternative file systems, XFS is not simply a rewrite or port of existing technology such as the UNIX System V or BSD file system. Since XFS was "built from scratch," SGI was able to integrate key features such as journaling for high reliability and redesign important areas such as the allocation algorithms for increased performance with large file systems. As a result, XFS is the first file system built to optimize performance for today's large, demanding, data-intensive environments.

Most other file systems on the market evolved in an age of smaller file systems, lower processing power, and limited storage capacity. As a result, many file systems are based on architectures that emphasize conserving storage space at the expense of performance. The revolutionary growth of CPU and storage technology has fueled a dramatic increase in the size and complexity of data, outstripping the capabilities of many file systems. SGI designed XFS to meet this increasing need to manage large complex file systems with high performance and reliability. Thus, completely different design targets were established for XFS:

• Scalable features and performance from small to truly huge data (petabytes)
• Huge numbers of files (millions)
• Exceptional performance: 500+ MBytes/second
• Designed with log/database (journal) technology as a fundamental part not just an extension to an existing file system
• Mission-critical reliability

The cutting-edge XFS technology opens up new opportunities in the marketplace by enabling users to manage large amounts of data with unsurpassed speed. This is particularly advantageous in NAS environments. Additionally, new programmatic features and interfaces such as guaranteed rate I/O provide unique advantages to users. In particular, the fast, guaranteed response time of XFS is excellent for digital media servers and other real-time applications. Finally, the growing necessity for business-critical reliability is driving corporations toward robust journaled file systems such as XFS.

As a result of the SGI advances in file system design, SGI InfiniteStorage NEXIS systems deliver exceptionally fast NFS and CIFS write and read performance, allowing SGI solutions to serve the most demanding applications. Advanced functionality, such as NFS version 4, complement high-end performance with high-end capabilities suited to a broad range of vertical markets and applications.

SGI InfiniteStorage NEXIS NAS Family

The new SGI NAS family builds on the success of previous generations of SGI storage. The SGI InfiniteStorage NEXIS 5000 and 7000 Series NAS solutions give users expanded functionality and enable support of a broader range of storage options. For smaller groups and teams, the SGI InfiniteStorage NEXIS 2000 and 500 NAS solutions offer the same high-end functionality, advanced Appliance Manager software, and scalability in platforms tailored for department and workgroup deployments, respectively. The SGI InfiniteStorage NEXIS 1000 NAS Gateway completes the family with a solution that fully leverages existing storage investments and allows users to quickly introduce the benefits of a NAS approach for storage sharing and management.

An Expanding Base of NAS Users

SGI InfiniteStorage NEXIS NAS solutions are ideal for areas of enterprise HPC including database transactions, data mining, media rich on-line social networks, departmental consolidation and vertical market applications including media production, oil & gas exploration, scientific and engineering modeling, business intelligence, satellite and medical imagery.

"Our team of storage experts continues to improve the world of consolidated, centralized storage," said Raj Das, vice president of storage at SGI. "SGI InfiniteStorage NEXIS NAS gets the best performance and value possible out of today's storage technologies. Additionally, the new family of solutions underscores our commitment to innovation for the NAS market-the unmatched combination of factory integration, bundled management tools, and scalability make them excellent long-term solutions for HPC and performance-oriented business customers."