SeaMicro Freedom Fabric Storage

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Massive Capacity, High Performance Storage for the AMD SeaMicro SM15000 Fabric Compute Systems

With the growing need to store and process data, enterprises are constantly expanding their storage infrastructure. To meet this need, IT organizations are under pressure to employ more efficient and cost effective storage technologies. AMD’s SeaMicro Freedom™ Fabric Storage brings the benefits of the SeaMicro Freedom™ Supercomputing Fabric to storage solutions thereby increasing efficiency by enabling pooling and flexible provisioning of storage resources according to the application’s needs.

The SeaMicro Freedom Fabric Storage Family consists of three storage enclosure offerings to address the varying application needs from cloud computing, big data, and web to distributed data processing and data warehousing.

FS 5084-L:
Ultra-dense capacity optimized SAS/SATA storage system that supports up to 84 SAS/SATA LFF or SFF in five RU for up to 336 TB of capacity or up to five petabytes per SM15000. 

FS 2012-L:
2RU capacity-optimized SAS/SATA modular storage system for enterprises wanting to scale capacity as their need for data storage grows. The FS 2012-L supports up to 12 LFF 3.5” SAS/SATA disks for up to 48 TB of capacity or up to 768 TB per SM15000.

FS 2024-S:
2U 24-bay form factor for deploying performance optimized SAS/SATA storage. The FS 2024-S can support up to 24 SAS/SATA SFF 2.5” drives in a compact modular enclosure for performance-hungry applications.

All enclosures in the SeaMicro Freedom Fabric Storage Family support single or dual SAS controller modules for data path redundancy. They also support three x4 6 Gbps mini-SAS connectors per controller module providing up to 7.2 Gbps of throughput per enclosure in a dual controller configuration.

SeaMicro Freedom Fabric Storage enclosures are equipped with dual redundant power supplies, N+1 cooling modules, dual I/O modules, and dual data paths to all drives providing a robust highly available storage system. Further, all of these components including power supplies, IO modules, cooling modules, and disk drives, can be hot swapped to maintain storage availability despite component failures to ensure enterprise-class application availability.

Overview

• Capacity and performance optimized scalable 5 RU and 2 RU form factors
• Support for 2.5” or 3.5” SSD/HDD SAS/SATA drives
• Unprecedented scalability of over five petabytes of storage capacity per SM15000
• Dual IO controllers with three x4 6 Gbps mini-SAS connectors per controller for a total of 7.2 Gbps of throughput
• Hot swappable power supplies, controllers, and drives for enterprise-class availability
• Standard SCSI Enclosure Services (SES-2) to access enclosure management interface

Features and Benefits

Benefits of SeaMicro Freedom Fabric Storage with SeaMicro SM15000 Fabric Compute System
The SeaMicro SM15000 integrates up to 64 AMD Opteron™ or Intel® Xeon®-based x86 servers, top of rack Ethernet switching, server management, and application load balancing in a single 10 RU “plug and play” standards-based server. The storage architecture offers the best of both worlds from network (SAN/NAS) and direct attached storage (DAS) to dramatically reducing storage TCO by use of a shared storage model among the servers. Sharing storage capacity is more efficient since it does not tie a drive to a specific server. Storage capacity is a shared resource that can be provisioned and used by any server.

Industry Leading Scalability
SeaMicro Freedom Fabric Storage brings industry leading scalability to scale up from zero to five petabytes of storage capacity per SM15000 system in a flexible manner. Unlike traditional rack mount server deployments in which adding storage capacity requires the addition of compute and network resources, SeaMicro Freedom Fabric Storage allows storage capacity to expand independent of compute and network resources. This cost of adding incremental storage capacity to an existing system, prevents the underutilization of compute and network, and allows flexible compute to storage ratio to reduce TCO of storage infrastructure.

High Capacity Utilization
SeaMicro Freedom Fabric Storage is shared across the servers on an SM15000 system to allow better amortization of disks over computational resources. The SeaMicro SM15000 provides advanced storage virtualization capabilities to allow flexible provisioning of capacity into virtual disks that can be assigned to any server in the system. Further, a single virtual disk can be shared across multiple servers in read-only mode enabling users to store or update common data such as OS images and application software. The storage virtualization capabilities significantly increase capacity utilization, thus reducing the
overall cost of storage on the SM15000 fabric compute system.

Data Protection with Integrated Hardware RAID
SeaMicro Freedom Fabric Storage on an SM15000 system integrates RAID levels 0, 1, 5, 6, and 10 on the storage controller hardware allowing a high degree of data protection for mission-critical data. Any of the RAID levels can be optionally configured across storage enclosures on the SM15000.

Ease of Management
SeaMicro Freedom Fabric Storage can be easily deployed with the SM15000 system and managed from a centralized management interface. Storage configuration, provisioning of volumes to servers, monitoring and fault management can be performed via a multitude of management API that are supported by the SM15000.

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SeaMicro Fabric Storage Highlights with SM15000

• Unprecedented, industry-leading storage scalability with up to 5 petabytes per SM15000
• Efficient storage utilization with shared capacity across all servers on the SM15000 to reduce storage TCO
• Storage capacity can be scaled independent of compute resources to reduce cost of storage capacity
• Integrated hardware based RAID levels 0, 1, 5, 6, or 10
• Centralized storage management with SM15000 Storage CLI for ease of deployment and management
• On-demand capacity addition with hot addition of storage controllers, SeaMicro Fabric Storage, and disks