Rackable Systems Launches Eco-Logical Storage Platforms

Eco-Friendly Clustered Storage and External JBOD Arrays Leverage DC Power Technology and Superior Design for Increased Price Performance per Watt: Rackable Systems today announced the availability of the next generation of the company’s award-winning, high performance RapidScale clustered storage appliances and its new OmniStor SE3016 system. The new generation of Rackable Systems Eco-Logical storage products features high efficiency, low power consumption and smart design to optimize price performance per watt in even the most complex computing environments. Leveraging Rackable Systems’ patented DC Power technology, RapidScale achieves proven, significant power savings in any AC- or DC-based data center while providing unparalleled performance of up to tens of Gigabytes per second of I/O throughput. Ideal for any industry requiring large-scale storage solutions, including Internet, oil and gas, and government labs, the new generation of RapidScale introduces a host of additional features, including small file and random IOPS performance, improved HA failover and heterogeneous network support. The RapidScale SA2150 appliance is designed and built in Rackable Systems’ hallmark half-depth form factor to enable back-to-back mounting for highest density and superior cooling, achieving further power reductions in HVAC expenses while maximizing valuable data center space. “Our existing RapidScale appliances, clustered with Rackable Systems servers, have enabled us to sustain more than 3.2 Gigabytes per second to disk and double our computational capacity while actually reducing our power costs,” said Dr. Charles Taylor, senior HPC engineer at University of Florida. “We look forward to deploying this new generation of RapidScale appliances to achieve even greater performance and savings.” The latest release of RapidScale incorporates the new RapidScale 2.2 operating system and provides key upgrades, including:
  • Performance: Yields twice the metadata performance over previous versions and an astounding 30 percent improvement in streaming performance
  • Resilience: Displays exceptional resilience, including ability to failover/failback between IB, GigE and 10GigE without interrupting client applications
  • Scalability: Scales linearly to hundreds of GB/sec of throughput and hundreds of Petabytes of capacity over previous versions
  • Simplicity: GUI-based configurations improve usability
  • Efficiency: Delivers 90+% of raw disk performance to the client application

In addition to the cost savings advantages of reduced power consumption and heat output at the system level, RapidScale also achieves greater system reliability and uptime, enabling data centers to deploy environmentally-friendly clustered storage without compromising performance or availability. The new OmniStor SE3016 expansion system provides an easy, scalable, power-friendly way to add external storage to Rackable Systems servers. Ideal for cost-sensitive bulk-tier storage requirements or performance-sensitive database environments, the new OmniStor SE3016 supports up to 16 SAS or SATA II drives per system with 1.2 Gigabytes per second of bandwidth between the server and the storage device. Mounted back-to-back in a Rackable Systems cabinet, two OmniStor SE3016 systems achieve storage density of 32 drives per 3U of rack space—with up to 416 Terabytes per cabinet. Featuring Rackable Systems’ award-winning DC power technology (and also available in a high efficiency AC design), a single OmniStor SE3016 system consumes a mere 305 watts of power, even when equipped with sixteen 15K SAS drives operating at full spin. With power-efficient 1 TB SATA II drives expected to come to market shortly, power draw in the OmniStor SE3016 may be reduced to a mere 170 watts per system—providing an ideal complement to Rackable Systems’ power-friendly, highly efficient server offerings. “The newest generation of RapidScale technology, along with our cost-effective new expansion system, enables Rackable Systems to continue to provide our customers with low wattage, high performance, high quality storage,” said Rackable Systems President and CEO Mark J. Barrenechea. “Rackable Systems’ unique ability to marry environmentally-friendly designs with a smart, common-sense approach to data center solutions is what we like to call ‘Eco-Logical’—a methodology we apply to all our server and storage products as we strive to help reduce the carbon footprint of the data center in a cost-effective and meaningful way.” Both RapidScale and OmniStor SE3016 are designed and built by Rackable Systems in the United States and are available now for purchase.