Lustre made simple by DataDirect Networks

17 Apr 2012 Chatsworth - DataDirect Networks (DDN), a world expert in massively scalable storage, and Whamcloud, a venture-backed company formed from a worldwide network of high-performance computing (HPC) storage industry veterans, are offering Whamcloud's Chroma Enterprise with DDN's ExaScaler parallel file storage product to radically simplify Lustre file system management and accelerate ExaScaler adoption within enterprise Big Data environments.

Chroma Enterprise is designed from the ground up to eliminate the complexity of support and management of sophisticated parallel file storage by providing simple, easy-to-use systems management which is tightly integrated with the Lustre file system and DDN's Storage Fusion Architecture (SFA) massively scalable and HPC-optimized storage platforms. With this new offering, DDN will add installation, configuration, maintenance, monitoring, and fault diagnosis capabilities to its ExaScaler offering within one unified administration portal that features an intuitively simple interface.

The announcement of Chroma Enterprise is the first of several developments DDN will announce throughout the year as part of a extensive R&D effort to eliminate systems management complexity of hyperscale Big Data storage infrastructure.

"Our testing already shows great potential for extending Lustre adoption. Chroma Enterprise quickly provides a deep understanding of the relationship between workload and storage performance, something only available to serious Lustre veterans until now", stated Stephen Simms, manager of the High Performance File Systems group at Indiana University. "Chroma Enterprise will enable organisations to use Lustre without the need for extensive training. This is a significant leap for Lustre."

"We are pleased to provide Chroma Enterprise as part of our proven and tightly integrated Exascale solution. For over a decade, DDN has led the Lustre community in delivering enterprise-grade, highly-efficient and scalable Lustre file system infrastructure and has powered the majority of the world's fastest Lustre deployments", stated Larry Jones, Senior Director of Product Management at DDN. "DDN's factory-configured, plug-and-play solutions are complemented by Chroma Enterprise to deliver the lowest TCO in the marketplace for hyperscale enterprise storage technology."

"The technology that DDN brings forward in its ExaScaler offering is complemented by Whamcloud's deep solutions delivery capability that comes from long HPC experience and the largest Lustre file system support and delivery team. We're very pleased to announce the availability of new tools to foster the adoption of parallel file storage across the world", stated Brent Gorda, CEO of Whamcloud. "By combining Chroma Enterprise with DDN's ExaScaler file storage platform, what was previously complex is now just ... simple."

DDN is announcing the immediate early-access availability of the Chroma toolset with its ExaScaler offering.