DDN this week launched its SFA12K series, which will replace the SFA10K product that the vendor has had success selling to HPC shops.

DDN CEO Alex Bouzari said the biggest improvements over the SFA10K are the internal network inside the appliance, the storage processing that lets customers embed file systems or applications inside the appliance, and greater density.

The SFA12K has 64GB of memory and DDN claims it scales to 1 TBps with 25 arrays using InfiniBand or Fibre Channel connectivity. It also runs up to 16 virtual machines inside an array. The SFA12K holds up to 84 2.5-inch or 3.5-inch SAS or SATA disks in one array – up from 60 drives in the SFA10K – and 840 disks in a rack. The SFA12K supports up to 600TB of eMLC solid-state drives (SSDs).

The SFA12K platform consists of three products. The SFA12K-40 is the highest performing model, hitting 40 GBps of bandwidth and 1.4 million flash IOPs. A SFA12K-20 handles 20 GBps and 700,000 flash IOPS, according to DDN. The SFA12K-20E is available with DDN’s ExaScaler or GridScaler parallel file systems running on the SFA12K-20 array. Customers can also embed applications natively within the SFA12K-20E.

The SFA10K could deliver 800,000 flash IOPS and 15 GBps of bandwidth. Bouzari said a new architecture was needed to keep up with larger data sets, cloud computer requirements and data center power and footprint restraints.

“In HPC, people are asking for levels of performance that just cannot be achieved by following the same old approaches,” he said. “Today you have large data centers being built and types of processing requirements deployed inside data centers that cannot be met with traditional architectures.”

Bouzar said IBM and Hewlett-Packard are among the DDN partners who will resell the new platform. The SFA12K won’t go GA until the second quarter of 2012, but DDN said it has more than 50 PB of orders including a 15 PB purchase by the Leibniz Supercomputing Center (LRZ) in Munich. LRZ already uses DDN storage for its SuperMUC HPC supercomputer. DDN said Argonne National Laboratory has also purchased SFA12K technology for its IBM BlueGene/Q-based Mira supercomputer.

Xyratex has moved to solve this problem for HPC customers with the ClusterStor 3000. The ClusterStor 3000 is a scale-out Lustre storage system that can support tens of petabytes in capacity and from 2.5 GBps to 1TBps throughput in performance. The ClusterStor 3000 ships with Lustre integrated, as well as full support and an integrated management tool.

ClusterStor 3000 customers will have a fully supported, high performance storage system that uses the Lustre file system. The ClusterStor system also includes ClusterStor Manager, a single administrative interface that simplifies configuration and management tasks instead of requiring admins to manage individual element as in previous Lustre deployments.

Xyratex last year signaled its commitment to Lustre when it acquired ClusterStor, a startup including founding members of the Lustre team Peter Braam and Peter Bojanic. Braam and Bojanic remain at Xyratex.

Xyratex has a long history of delivering components and systems to OEMs for a wide range of products. Its OEM partners include NetApp, IBM, Dell and EMC. Offering the ClusterStor 3000 is a major step for Xyratex because it matches a need in the market for HPC storage with a complete system based on a fully supported version of Lustre.

Like Xyratex’s other products, ClusterStor 3000 will be sold through OEM partners. None have signed on yet, but Xyratex executives expect it to hit the market late this year. Xyratex positions ClusterStor as competitive to Lustre-based systems from DataDirect Networks and NetApp’s Engenio division.

(Randy Kerns is Senior Strategist at Evaluator Group, an IT analyst firm).

DDN is preparing to launch – probably next month – a NASScaler product that DDN’s EVP of strategy and technology Jean-Luc Chatelain said will be “aimed at the NetApp market” rather than HPC.

“It has standard IT NAS-type behavior,” Chatelain said. “We realized the demand for the density, bandwidth, capacity and performance that we used to see in specialty machines has migrated toward the traditional NAS market. It’s the standard NFS behavior on top of high performance computing.”

The NASScaler will be DDN’s fourth file storage system, to go with its xStreamScaler for media and entertainment, GridScaler for cloud and HPC and ExaScaler for supercomputing.

DDN bills itself as the largest private storage vendor, an assessment that IDC agrees with. DDN executives claim the vendor generated $180 million in revenue in 2010 and grew about 40% in 2009 and 2010. The vendor’s storage sells into what EMC calls “big data” markets, which are the same ones NetApp intends to chase with LSI Engenio. Those markets include HPC, media and entertainment, digital security, and as a platform for cloud providers.

It will take awhile before DDN can provide NetApp with solid competition in mainstream NAS, but the vendors will contend for both end user customers and OEM partners in the HPC space. The Engenio 7900 Storage System competes with DDN’s products, and is sold by OEMs including Cray, Teradata and SGI.

“It will be interesting to see what happens now,” Chatelain said. “NetApp is not focused on the domain where we play. NetApp is not a brand name in the world of high performance computing or rich media. We are known as people committed to those verticals.”