SystemFabricMem
System Fabric Works (SFW) is a leader in the continued evolution to higher bandwidth and lower latency computing and networks (Fabric Computing) that drives advances in High Performance Computing (HPC). This includes active contribution to the OpenFabrics Alliance which is developing standard APIs and protocols for Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) over InfiniBand and 10 Gigabit Ethernet fabrics. The SFW products enable high bandwidth and low latency access to large files through direct fabric attachment. The high bandwidth is enabled through the use of 10 and 20 gigabit fabrics and the low latency through RDMA, both for RAID arrays of disks and through a partnership with Violin Memory with their Memory Appliance solutions.
Fabric Attached Memory greatly accelerates random access to large datasets and enables large clusters to effectively share common data without disk contention and latency issues. Using solid state memory technologies eliminates disk seek times and greatly improves bandwidth and latency performance.
The use of Fabric networks, RDMA and solid state technologies enables latencies to be lowered from milliseconds to microseconds. The benefits to applications of a 1000 times reduction in latency can be very significant. Applications, such as databases, have been measured as having a greater than 30x increase in performance by using solid state storage rather than disk. For some applications, the acceleration may be even more significant.
Fabric Attached Memory provides High Performance Computing (HPC) environments with a uniquely scalable and low latency approach to sharing data within a cluster. Violin’s memory can scale to over 8 TByte of DRAM in a single rack and the OpenFabrics software (InfiniBand or 10 Gb Ethernet) supports bandwidths greater than 1 GByte/s per server with random access patterns. Applications that are seek-bound or latency sensitive will greatly benefit from Fabric Attached Memory.
FABRICSTOR MEMORY SOLUTIONS
FabricStor Appliances have been integrated with Violin Memory Appliances to enable Fabric Attached Memory solutions. These appliances are interconnected via 8 lane PCI express connections. A single FabricStor Appliance can be the head-end for up to 4 Violin Memory Appliances and a total capacity of over 2000 GByte, or 2Terabytes of memory in less than 12U rack space.
Violin’s Memory Appliances enable terabyte scale memory systems in a compact footprint and with significant power savings. A single 2U appliance can today support 504 GByte of DRAM. This memory can be put in a RAID configuration for extreme data reliability.
SFW’s FabricStor Appliances are built to capitalize on the scalability of Fabric networks, RDMA standards, commodity x86 processors, PCI Express and SAS/SATA/NVRAM/Flash storage technologies. SFW supplies and supports two industry standard I/O transport architectures for RDMA – Ethernet and InfiniBand – two operating systems (O/S) that employ these – Linux and Windows – and leverage the benefits of the open source software stack, “OpenFabrics”, that ties the user application on the initiator system through its O/S across the transport fabric to the target system’s directly attached storage.
Tied tightly together, these appliances enable extremely scalable Fabric Attached Memory. Platforms with densities greater than 200 GByte per Rack Unit can be built. Violin’s industry leadership in power efficiency and the “green” nature of RDMA architectures enable memory to be scaled out at less than 1.5W per GByte. This is 80% lower than industry standards today.
For more information info@systemfabricworks.com
