[dokument]

Didn't Dell acquire EMC?

[pinewurst]

Yes, but EMC doesn't do that level of storage. For HPC, Dell resells various hodgepodges of their servers running Lustre (or rarely GPFS) with JBOD or cheesy RAID for the disks themselves.

[vonmoltke]

To be fair, the post is not clear in whether Dell is supplying the storage as well. NOAA may be adding SAN storage from a place like DDN.

[SEJeff]

And DDN would still not be enough. DDN would be paired with something such as Lustre or IBM's GPFS to run the storage for big iron such as this.

[vonmoltke]

I understand that, because those are basically the only filesystems anyone could use for this application. The comment was aimed at the "various hodgepodges of their servers ... with JBOD or cheesy RAID for the disks themselves" part.

[InclinedPlane]

Isilon is part of EMC which is part of Dell (now). They do scale-out fault tolerant storage up to multi-petabytes.

[pinewurst]

But Isilon is purely NFS (and/or SMB/CIFS) and doesn't support the parallel access that GPFS or Lustre do. It's not really a choice for this workload. Plus it'd be a lot more expensive than HPC storage - enterprise level RAS (reliability, serviceability, availability) costs. I've seen comparable capacity Isilon & DDN quotes (w/GPFS or Lustre) and they're worlds apart.