DDN Unveils EXA5 For HPC, Big Data And AI Acceleration & Multicloud Data Management At ISC19

Integrating STRATAGEM, DDN's Advanced New Policy Engine, EXA5 Raises the Bar for AI and HPC Environments with New Features, Additional Security, Greater Reliability and Performance Optimizations

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DataDirect Networks (DDN)

Jun 17, 2019, 09:00 ET

FRANKFURT, Germany and SANTA CLARA, Calif., June 17, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- ISC19 (Booth D-1120) -- DDN®, the global leader in AI, HPC and Multicloud Data Management, today announced EXA5, the next generation of DDN's EXAScaler® Storage, which will be showcased at the ISC High Performance Conference in Frankfurt, Germany at booth D-1120. Expanding on DDN's leading at-scale solutions, EXA5 provides deeper, more powerful integrations into AI and HPC ecosystems through simpler implementation and scaling models, easier visibility into workflows and powerful global data management features.

"We've built EXA5 directly for the new era of HPC and AI in the context of Multicloud. We are introducing an entirely new set of features aimed at today's most demanding AI and HPC end-to-end requirements, at any scale," said James Coomer, senior vice president of products, DDN. "EXA5 leads on performance, on prem and in the cloud, with unmatched capabilities in security, stability, user and data management."

EXA5 allows for scaling either with all NVMe flash or with a hybrid approach, offering flexible scaling according to needs with the performance of flash or the economics of HDDs. Compatible with DDN's A³I® storage solutions, which are factory pre-configured and optimized for AI, deployment is made easy while reducing deployment time for an AI-ready data center. Together they provide full benchmarking, documentation and qualification with AI and GPU environments.

"With the goal of expanding the boundaries of science as we know it today, we are excited about the arrival of advanced new technology that can dramatically increase the performance at scale of our systems, and specifically of our new Top 10 supercomputer, Frontera," said Dan Stanzione, executive director, Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC). "DDN's new EXA5 has the power to provide the best I/O performance our users have ever experienced, and greatly reduce the I/O bottlenecks in large scale computation. We believe that EXA5 will play a role in many of the groundbreaking discoveries scientists will make with Frontera."

EXA5 features and capabilities include:

STRATEGEM® – As DDN's integrated policy engine, STRATEGEM enables platforms for transparent flash tiering for high performance and efficiency. Featuring built-in fast and efficient data management, users can manage most active data to scale-out flash tiers from scale-out HDD tiers. It also automatically controls free space on flash, quickly responding to changing demands and efficiently scanning storage devices directly to find target files.
Expanded Integration with DDN Insight – With comprehensive monitoring for multi-solutions, DDN Insight provides unprecedented real-time visibility into software and appliances. Through deep real-time analysis, it derives the most value from storage infrastructures and sorts running jobs by metadata activity and throughput operations. With easy identification of problem jobs, it can quickly resolve performance issues. It is also extensively scalable, allowing for open back-end database and integration with other systems and switches to cope with millions of stats per second.
Gateway – With a NAS type interface, non-native DDN Lustre users can export filesystems through DDN CIFS and NFS gateways. Providing another avenue to get access to high performance data, the solution can scale horizontally as needed to maintain consistency and lock semantics with Linux/Unix and Windows systems.
Flexible Small File Acceleration - Complementary to granular metadata scaling, EXA5 opens the ability to scale across EXAScaler servers, allowing for efficient application of flash to small files. It also simply expands the domain of file sizes from a few KB to multiple MB.
Data Protection – EXA5 includes integrated end-to-end data protection using T10PI/DIX standard. With fully transparent applications, users are supported by EXAScaler through drives, resulting in minimal performance impact.
Security – Additional security measures including KMIP and FIPS support plus EXA5 auditing capabilities and multi-tenenacy.

Tweet this: At #ISC19, @DDN_Limitless unveiled new #EXA5 data appliance for accelerated at scale #AI and #HPC. Visit booth D-1120 to learn more. http://bit.ly/2IFVT8G #ISChpc

"The launch of DDN's EXAScaler 5 further improves Lustre data management capabilities to address complex and ever-growing data needs," said Bill Mannel, vice president and general manager, HPC and AI at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. "We support DDN's ongoing contributions to the HPC Lustre Community and look forward to continuing our long-standing collaboration."

ISC High Performance 2019 Conference Information
DDN is a Gold Sponsor at the ISC High Performance 2019 Conference and will be taking part in the following events.

Time	Event and Details
*Monday, June 17*
9 – 12 p.m.	DDN User Group Conference at ISC, Movenpick Hotel Frankfurt City: Join the community of scientists, researchers and technologists and discover how organizations are assessing and leveraging technology to raise the bar on AI and HPC innovations and best practices. To attend, register here.
1 – 3:10 p.m.	Vendor Showdown 02, Panorama 3 Room: Jan Heichler, presales manager at DDN, will be speaking about DDN's new launched EXA5 and the differentiated approach DDN takes to data challenges for AI, HPC and Big Data.
4 – 5 p.m.	Lustre Birds of a Feather, Kontrast Room: Peter Jones of Whamcloud will join developers, administrators, users and solution providers to discuss the challenges and status of the community that continues to drive Lustre forward.
*Tuesday, June 18*
11 – 12 p.m.	Presentation, Booth E-1028: Sven Oehme, DDN Field CTO, will take stage in the Google Cloud booth theater to dive into the hybrid cloud solution and the benefits for Lustre environments.
12:40 – 1 p.m.	Exhibitor Forum, Booth N-210: James Coomer, senior vice president of product at DDN, will be presenting, "Announcing EXA5 – A profound transformation of HPC and AI storage: Accelerated innovation AND continuous availability, robust user and data management with blistering parallel performance."
7 p.m. – 10 p.m.	DDN ISC 2019 Party: DDN will be hosting a special evening of food and drinks following the long day of events. Invitations and more information can be obtained at the User Group Conference or DDN booth.
*Thursday, June 20*
9 – 6 p.m.	ISC-HPC I/O DAY, Frankfurt Marriott Hotel: Join us for a day dedicated to I/O. WOPSSS AND I/O in the Data Center workshops are is a forum to present and discuss work that addresses the storage challenge from a unique perspective, moving the focus from the application-centric perspective to the perspective of data centers and operators.

Availability
EXA5 solutions will be available directly from DDN and through certified partners early in calendar Q3.

Supporting Resources

About DDN
DataDirect Networks (DDN) is the world's leading big data storage supplier to data-intensive, global organizations. For more than 20 years, DDN has designed, developed, deployed and optimized systems, software and storage solutions that enable enterprises, service providers, universities and government agencies to generate more value and to accelerate time to insight from their data and information, on premise and in the cloud. Organizations leverage the power of DDN storage technology and the deep technical expertise of its team to capture, store, process, analyze, collaborate and distribute data, information and content at the largest scale in the most efficient, reliable and cost-effective manner. DDN customers include many of the world's leading financial services firms and banks, healthcare and life science organizations, manufacturing and energy companies, government and research facilities, and web and cloud service providers. For more information, follow us on twitter: @ddn_limitless, go to www.ddn.com or call 1-800-837-2298.

Contact:

Press Relations at DDN
[email protected]

Walt & Company, on behalf of DDN
Sharon Sumrit, 408.369.7200 x2981
[email protected]

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SOURCE DataDirect Networks (DDN)