Cray Expands Storage and Data Management Team
Global supercomputer provider Cray, which provides large-scale parallel storage systems for high performance computing (HPC), announced it has strengthened its storage and data management team with the addition of key individuals from SystemFabricWorks (SFW). Through an agreement with SFW, Cray has hired the majority of SFW’s employees as Cray continues its leadership in developing and deploying high-performance production parallel file system solutions for the HPC and Big Data marketplaces.
Among the SFW employees now working at Cray are Robert (Bob) Pearson, the former CEO of SFW, and Bill Boas, previously the vice president of business development for SFW and a co-founder of the Open Fabric Alliance. A number of highly-skilled engineers from SFW also have joined Cray’s storage and data management team, significantly enhancing Cray’s expertise in Lustre-based storage solutions. SFW is continuing its operations with a new management team.
“Expanding our team with some of the top storage and Infiniband engineering experts is an important step in continuing to drive Cray’s growth in the storage market,” said Barry Bolding, Cray’s vice president of storage and data management. “Our expanding base of HPC storage customers have demanding integration and deployment requirements and are looking for vendors like Cray that have experience in both storage and storage interconnects, such as Infiniband. At Cray, we are creating a storage team with the design expertise and best practices that are critical to the performance, management and scalability of parallel storage systems over time.”
Bolding added, “This announcement is another positive milestone in a recent string of new customer announcements for our scale-out Sonexion storage system, as well as our portfolio of storage offerings from partners such as Data Direct Networks and NetApp. It’s an exciting time for our team, and we’re looking forward to the future.”
To date, Cray has shipped more than 50 petabytes of storage capacity in 2012, and has delivered Cray Sonexion storage systems to customers in the energy, government and academic market segments. As part of the Blue Waters supercomputer at the University of Illinois’ National Center for Supercomputing Applications, Cray recently installed a 36-cabinet, 25 petabyte Sonexion storage system capable of delivering more than one terabyte-per-second of I/O bandwidth performance to more than 25,000 compute nodes.
In June, Cray announced it will deliver a next-generation Sonexion storage system to the Department of Energy’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) that will scale to more than six petabytes of usable storage and more than 140 gigabytes per second of sustained aggregate IO performance. A number of other leading HPC centers around the world have already signed contracts for Sonexion storage systems, including the Pawsey Centre in Perth, Australia, and the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) in Lugano, Switzerland.
The Cray Sonexion storage system is a fully integrated, Cray-supported scale-out Lustre storage system for HPC. The system’s modular, compact design helps to keep costs low and provides precision scalability for HPC clusters and applications of all types.
