Server and storage combo for big data

The obvious need for new, higher capacity storage with significantly faster I/O capabilities is driving new contenders to appear and new partnerships to form, with one of the latest to emerge being the coming together of Cleantech IT innovations company, Servergy, and Inktank, the producers Ceph, the massively scalable, open source, software-defined storage system.

Together, the pair is aiming to develop a new class of clean and green, high I/O, high density, large scale cloud compute and storage solution that integrates the distributed, highly scalable Ceph storage system with Servergy’s new class of high I/O clean and green PowerLinux Cleantech Servers.

“Data centers worldwide are faced with the ongoing explosion of big data, which creates rapidly growing I/O, power, cooling and space bottlenecks that continue to create serious problems for data center operators globally, as they look to expand large scale cloud storage platforms, like Ceph”

These servers are claimed to pay for themselves, on as global basis, by providing ultra-efficient, high I/O, high density, scale-out capability for cloud, big data, caching and distributed storage applications. In addition to reducing power, cooling, space, water, weight and carbon footprints by up to 80 percent or more, the new systems also have up to 16 times the I/O and compute density over traditional server technology. They weigh only 9 pounds, have the footprint of a legal pad and offer industry-leading performance-per-watt with maximum power consumption of around 100W at full load.

According to Bill Mapp, founder and CEO of Servergy, the partnership will help pay for itself by dramatically reducing space and power consumption, while generating up to 16X increase in I/O and compute density, “all of which are mission critical for datacentre operators,” he observed.

Servergy claims that the Cleantech Server is redefining server architecture and performance with an ultra-high efficiency and-density approach, and that the Ceph distributed storage system complements these features by running a distributed scalable storage cluster across a large number of systems. Ceph is a massively scalable, open source, software defined storage system.

It comprises an object store, a virtual block device and a POSIX-compatible distributed file system. The platform is capable of auto-scaling to the Exabyte level and beyond, is self-healing and self-managing, and has no single point of failure. The PowerLinux-based servers are intended to enable a new class of clean and green Ceph clusters.