SGI Announces Extreme Performance RAID Storage System

With the ability to scale in a single system to over 1,680 disk drives and 6.72PB the IS17000 is targeted for workflows that need uncompromised performance and scalability.

With first customer shipments of InfiniteStorage 17000 already underway with a massive multi-rack 8000-drive installation in Europe, the system is ready for primetime to provide the resiliency and performance needed for such high-end environments.

SGI customers routinely push the edge in performance and scalability requirements for storage systems, said Jose Reinoso, vice president of storage engineering at SGI. SGI InfiniteStorage 17000 is a platform that reliably addresses those needs and resets the bar for what to expect from a high-performance storage array.

Storage systems and servers must now be able to respond to heavily threaded I/O patterns by delivering extreme storage bandwidth, as well as high throughput. With the fusion of these unsurpassed levels of bandwidth and IOPS, InfiniteStorage 17000 delivers an extremely dense package that meets the needs of the most demanding unstructured and transaction-based environments.

As technical computing platforms have seen dramatic increases in density and performance, the I/O requirements are also becoming increasingly randomized and driving the need for greater throughput and higher IOPS, said Laura DuBois, program vice president at IDC. With InfiniteStorage 17000, SGI is addressing those challenges with the performance and density needed to keep up with such demands.

InfiniteStorage 17000 delivers leading storage access density and supports up to 160 dedicated 6GB SAS lanes and significantly greater storage access density than competing systems, aggregating and maximizing the performance of performance-intensive SSD devices to enable customers to avoid expensive PCIe-based approaches to Flash-based application acceleration. With FDR InfiniBand and Fibre Channel connectivity, the system is designed to fit into existing storage landscapes and easily scale file storage systems to 1TB/s and beyond.