ThinkParQ and Q-Leap Networks have announced a close partnership to deliver scalable storage solutions to their customers that are easy to deploy and operate. Based on the parallel filesystem BeeGFS and the cluster OS Qlustar, this will enable customers to build extremely fast storage for a wide range of workloads.

 Qlustar is a full-fledged Linux distribution designed for the use as an all-in-one Cluster Operating System. Being based on Debian/Ubuntu, it implements a number of ground-breaking approaches to next-generation cluster management that allow to setup and operate clusters of any size with low administrative overhead. A large number of systems in industry and academia are running on Qlustar with Q-Leap Networks providing services around them.

BeeGFS is the parallel filesystem developed at the Fraunhofer Center for High Performance Computing in Kaiserslautern. With their strong background in HPC, the developers understand the need of HPC users for fast and scalable storage very well. Delivering extremely high streaming bandwidth for parallel workloads as well as excellent performance on a single I/O-stream, BeeGFS is a perfect fit for a variety of workloads. The design is extremely flexible and implements techniques, such as data striping, full distribution of metadata, RDMA access as well as data replication and HSM.

Being able to run all services of the filesystem together on the same machine, BeeGFS is also a perfect choice for workloads such as BigData analytics that combine storage and compute on the same machines.

Integrating BeeGFS with Qlustar will create a software stack that allows easy roll-out and management of parallel storage starting from bare metal. It will help customers to keep up with the growing demand for both storage performance and capacity. Over the next couple of months, Q-Leap will integrate the BeeGFS packages and modules into Qlustar to support out-of-the-box deployment of the BeeGFS storage architecture. QluMan will then allow both console and GUI access for the configuration and operation of the storage components in a BeeGFS cluster and make them extremely easy to manage.