Lenovo is enabling IT organizations in high-performance computing (HPC) to take advantage of all the financial benefits of commodity storage hardware in a pre-integrated system.
Announced today at the Lenovo Accelerate Partner Forum, Scott Tease, executive director for HPC and artificial intelligence at Lenovo, says the Lenovo Distributed Storage Solution for IBM Spectrum Scale (DSS-G) combines Spectrum software developed by IBM to enable software-defined storage (SDS) with the latest Intel Xeon processors running on a Lenovo System x3650 M5 server.
That approach, says Tease, makes it possible for IT organizations to plug any types of disk storage they prefer using a just-a-bunch of disks (JBOD) approach to deploying storage hardware. A key enabler for providing this capability is that all the intelligence associated with managing the underlying storage now resides in software, says Tease.
“The RAID management is all done in software,” says Tease.
Initially, DSS-G only supports the Global Parallel File System (GPFS) developed by IBM. But Lenovo is promising that support for open source Ceph and Lustre file systems will be added soon.
Tease says even though the Lenovo System x3650 provides IT organizations a lot of flexibility in terms of disk storage, once the system is deployed, the IBM Spectrum software essentially enables an IT organization to logically manage that system as if it were an appliance. Thanks to the rise of hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), Tease notes that the management of servers and storage is becoming more unified than ever.
Of course, Lenovo is now pursuing multiple paths to achieving HCI, including a partnership with Nutanix. The one thing they all have in common, however, is that the number of use cases requiring storage software to be deployed on a dedicated system continues to narrow with each passing day.
