Advanced Clustering’s Storage Blocks system is designed to provide maximum throughput for storage, which is important because hard disk drive performance has remained stagnate for years while CPU performance has increased steadily.

In other storage systems, performance is tied to a single storage server, which means there is limited capacity, space and I/O operations. The potential for scalability and expansion are limited by the capabilities of each individual storage server.

Advanced Clustering’s solution expands the potential for parallel storage by aggregating multiple storage servers into a single filesystem. This means I/O can be processed by multiple servers, increasing storage capacity and enabling scalability. If you need more performance, simply add more storage servers.

“For our genomics workloads in particular, we need scalable and quick storage,” said Martin Forde, Systems Administator at AbbVie. “With BeeGFS, we can store multiple petabytes of data but can also access the data quickly because it’s shared across multiple servers.”

Prior to deploying the BeeGFS storage solution, AbbVie was reliant on data storage solutions that were not scalable.

“Scalability is very important to our users,” Forde said. “With the new BeeGFS solution, we’ve had quicker reads and writes and lower latency. People coming in no longer compete with our bandwidth for the data.”

The storage solution has brought faster access to data for the AbbVie team of researchers.

“In terms of transfer speeds, we’re experiencing three times faster than what we experienced previously,” Forde said. “We support a lot of projects. We need to be able to support that quantity of data. There’s a lof of small and mixed data. BeeGFS has made it possible for us to support large files and quickly access the small data – hundreds of millions of smaller files as well.”

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