DDN Launches EXA5 for AI, Big Data, HPC Workloads

DDN, for two decades competing at the headwaters of high performance storage, this morning announced an enterprise-oriented end-to-end high performance storage and data management for AI, big data and HPC acceleration. In so doing, the company said it’s bringing to the burgeoning enterprise market for AI some of the transferable capabilities with an emphasis on small file speed-ups required in AI workloads that the company has developed for HPC.Launched here at the ISC High Performance Conference in Frankfurt, EXA5 is the newest version of DDN’s EXAscaler Storage, designed to make the EXAscaler infrastructure easier to consume by offering what the company said are deeper integrations into AI and HPC ecosystems through simpler implementation and scaling models, visibility into workflows and global data management features.DDN said EXA5 allows for scaling either with flash or with a hybrid approach “offering flexible scaling according to needs with the performance of flash or the economics of HDDs.” EXA5 is compatible with DDN’s AI pre-configured A3I storage appliances, reducing deployment time, the company said. Together they provide benchmarking, documentation and qualification with AI and GPU environments.“We’re looking to eliminate some of that sprawl going on at the back end,” Kurt Kuckein, DDN director of marketing, told us. “Data lakes and distributed types of architectures with tightly coupled compute and storage are not able to drive the performance needed, and some archived solutions out there are too deep to be accessible. So what we’ve done is deliver exceptional performance while managing the cost profile, whether it’s cost per gigabyte served or cost per gigabyte stored on the back end.”DDN’s objective, Kuckein said, is coupling best-in-class technologies, “extracting the ultimate value out of emergent architectures. “We hear about organizations frustrated, for example, by high end NVME systems, you put a file system in front of it and the performance would be cut in half.”EXA5 features and capabilities include:Strategem is DDN’s integrated policy engine for flash tiering with data management capabilities that DDN said enables users to manage most active data to scale-out flash tiers from scale-out hard disc drive (HDD) tiers. It also controls free space on flash, responding to changing demands and scanning storage devices directly to find target files.