SGI introduces clustered filesystem with support for Solaris

Mountain View 10 September 2001 SGI has launched the CXFS Version 2.0, a scalable, journaled clustered filesystem with extended capabilities to support the Solaris operating system. SGI CXFS is a clustered solution that provides a single filesystem accessible on a heterogeneous storage area network (SAN) from multiple hosts, including IRIX, Linux, Windows NT, Windows 2000 and now Solaris. With this new capability, SGI IRIX OS-based customers can seamlessly share data with Solaris OS-based systems in real time, thereby increasing productivity and reducing costs. Built on the high-performance SGI XFS filesystem and the next-generation SGI XVM volume manager, CXFS enables multiple computers direct access to a shared filesystem, which means all systems in a CXFS environment have access to the same file at the same time at local or near-local speeds.

Creative and technical professionals rely on SGI for modular solutions to solve the largest, most complex data and content management challenges that require massive scalability and the highest throughput. Customers in markets such as media, sciences, energy, and government and defense have embraced SGI CXFS IRIX solutions for their performance-sensitive data-sharing needs, and with this announcement SGI extends its solutions to a broader set of customers. SGI CXFS Version 2.0 leverages the SGI modular data-management architecture and fulfills customers' needs in areas such as high-availability application clustering with SGI FailSafe , virtual storage with SGI Data Migration Facility (DMF) and backup software from SGI partners.

SGI CXFS provides no-compromise data sharing by combining unparallelled scalability and performance with SAN technology, enabling computer users to efficiently share data, which leads to faster time to insight and more powerful scientific and creative innovation. SANs provide direct, high-speed physical connections among multiple hosts and disk storage that gives CXFS data-sharing performance that is at least 10 times faster than traditional methods such as NFS or manually copying files using FTP. Implementing CXFS reduces costs by centralising and consolidating storage, reducing data duplication, lowering administration costs, removing local area network bottlenecks and streamlining the application workflow. Single files as large as 9 million terabytes and filesystems as large as 18 million terabytes are supported, ensuring that CXFS users never hit the limit of file or filesystem size.

CXFS features include:

  • Industry-leading performance
  • Journaling for reliability and fast recovery
  • 64-bit scalability to support extremely large files and filesystems
  • Real time filesystems
  • Dynamically allocated metadata space, ensuring that data integrity is preserved
  • Built-in metadata server multihost failover

As the foundation for support of CXFS clients, the SGI family of storage solutions offers storage consolidation and management, back-up, and hierarchical storage management solutions. SGI storage solutions, which deliver the highest performance and data availability with multi-OS support for IRIX, Linux, Windows NT, Windows 2000 and Solaris, include:

  • SGI TP9100, a flexible RAID storage solution with an entry-level price that is available in rack or deskside configuration, enabling customers to scale to multi-terabyte configurations
  • SGI TP9400, a midrange storage solution with up to 7.3TB of storage capacity in a single rack and RAID support that offers true redundancy of all active components in the subsystem
  • HDS 9960, an enterprise storage array with the most highly available, cost-effective high-end multiplatform disk array on the market, which allows for 24-hour instantaneous data access

SGI CXFS is supported on all SGI IRIX OS-based systems. Entry price for CXFS is $2500, and the solution is capable of scaling up to 64 systems, each with up to 512 processors. CXFS for Solaris will be available the first quarter of 2002.

Ad Emmen

[News on Advanced IT]   [Calendar]   [Analysis]   [IT in Medicine]