Ddn wheels out big chungus of a storage box, the disgustingly scalable exa5

Tintris California-based data-nomming daddy, HPC player DDN, has squeezed out the latest crop of appliances in its EXAScaler product family, EXA5.The range includes five storage appliances for HPC and machine learning workloads, available in all-flash (SFA200NV and SFA400NV) or hybrid configurations (SFA7990, SFA18K, SFA14KX).The software accompanying the boxes is based on Lustre 2.1 file system, beloved by the supercomputing crowd for its ability to scale and support very large clusters.Thanks to Lustre, EXA5 can scale to more than 20PB per appliance and hundreds of petabytes per filesystem. DDN claimed it can deliver up to 90GB/s of throughput per appliance or 1TB/s per server rack.Traditionally a box vendor, DDN is increasingly getting into software. In mid-2018 it bought Intel's Lustre file system business, along with all the developers. It was already fairly tight with Lustre, used throughout DDN's EXAScaler storage system range.A few months later, DDN set up a new software business unit to build virtualization, analytics and application containers. DDN also recently picked up struggling flash vendor Tintri, which developed software for server virtualization, DevOps and VDI, as well as Nexenta, a specialist in software-defined storage.