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WORLD’S FASTEST HYBRID SSD AND DISK, EMBEDDED AND HYPER-CONVERGED

To address the comprehensive needs of HPC environments, the revolutionary DDN SFA14KX Hybrid and Hyper-Converged Solution delivers 60GB/s, 3.5 Million IOPs and industry-leading density in a single 4U appliance.

DATA GROWTH IS A CHALLENGE AND A STRATEGIC OPPORTUNITY

One of the biggest continuous challenges in HPC is the ability to manage and take advantage of huge data growth. Compute performance increases at a much faster rate than storage media performance while data is growing faster than compute, making storage the most strategic component of the high performance data center performance.

Technologies have only provided help in at least one dimension: access, performance or growth. New flash products raise the performance of an individual drive. Higher performance networks will drive data into and out of compute faster. New technologies like burst buffers will speed applications. But each of these alleviates only one part of the problem.

INTRODUCING THE MOST ADVANCED AND COMPLETE HPC STORAGE PLATFORM

By integrating the latest high-performance technologies from silicon, to interconnect, memory and storage, the SFA14KX changes the future of HPC architecture design. The revolutionary DDN SFA14KX is a high-performance block storage and hyper-converged platform that accelerates them with DDN high-performance software features and balances them to deliver the fastest performance at the lowest latency.

Intelligent caching and full bandwidth infrastructure delivers maximum advantage from SAS based SSDs, NVME* and HDDs. Non-blocking internal PCI-e and 12Gb SAS fabrics ensure fast, low latency data access while high performance networking connectivity options like InifiniBand™, Intel® Omni-Path, FC, Ethernet significantly reduce the number of ports, cables and network devices lowering acquisition and administrative costs.

SFA14KX delivers an unmatched number of SSD and spinning drives in the least amount of space, making it one of the most dense storage solutions on the market. This extreme level of density makes the SFA14KX ideal for data centers with limited space, or any high-performance environment needing to expand capacity without adding the complexity of many appliances to manage and the cost of powering and cooling a large number of controllers.

Frequently Asked Questions

WORLD'S FASTEST HYPER-CONVERGED ARCHITECTURE

Delivers more than 3.5 million IOPS, 60GB/sec and the highest density storage in 4U available in the industry today. Ingests, analyzes and distributes data at top speeds to deliver results many times faster than competing systems.

UNPRECEDENTED PER RACK PERFORMANCE

Delivers up to 9PB in a single rack and up to 16X the per rack performance of its closest competitor. The decreased data center footprint reduces both cost and complexity

HIGHEST EFFICIENCY FOR MIXED WORKLOADS

Handles small, large and mixed IO workloads that would cripple most systems built for high performance.

EMBEDDED PCIE FABRIC

The only hardware platform that hosts applications on an embedded PCI-e fabric to deliver up to 10 times the latency reduction from application to memory to storage

INDUSTRY-LEADING PERFORMANCE

Delivers up to 10X the performance of previous SFA generations and up to 40X the performance of competing platforms with more than 5X the IOPS of DDN’s closest competitor.

FLEXIBLE, MULTI-DIMENSIONAL FILE SYSTEM SCALING

Scales up or scales out to allow users to buy only what they need, to optimize performance, density or both

WIDEST BREADTH OF INTERCONNECT OPTIONS

Interconnect options include InfiniBand, Omni-Path, Fibre Channel and Ethernet, and leverages NVMe memory along with Solid State and hard disk storage

SIMPLICITY AT SCALE

With utmost simplicity at scale, the solution’s convergence benefits reduce administration costs up to 70%

FASTER REBUILDS

SFA Declustered RAID (DCR) significantly improves rebuild performance.  DCR allows for the striping of data across a much larger set of physical disks than was previously available in traditional RAID and greatly increasing the parallelism of drive rebuilds.  It is this parallel process that enable rebuilds to run much faster than traditional RAID.  In addition to decreasing recovery times, DCR can also result in increased storage efficiency and higher IOPs performance.

SFA14K Configurations & Specifications

SFA14KX CONFIGURATIONS: START SMALL AND SCALE ON DEMAND

4RU 24RU 44RU 84 RU
Up to 72 Slots Up to 522 Slots* Up to 972 Slots* Up to 1,872 Slots*

TECHNICAL SPECIFICATIONS

SFA14KX

SFA14KXE

SYSTEM FEATURES Active-Active Storage Controller in Single 4RU enclosure; Supported Drives: Up to 1,872*; Max Capacity: drive and enclosure dependent (currently 21.7PB); 2 Compute Controllers: 4 x 18-core Intel CPUs, 512GB DDR4 memory; 72 x 12Gb/s SAS 2.5” slots; 4 x 480GB SSD System Drives; 4 x 480GB SSD Virtual Machine Drives (SFA14KXE); Redundant Power
HOST, STORAGE FABRIC AND NETWORK PORTS
    12x InfiniBand™ EDR/FDR; 24x Fibre Channel (FC16) Ports
8x InfiniBand™ EDR/FDR/Ethernet, 40/100GbE Ethernet, 4x on Intel® Omni-Path
SYSTEM FABRIC AND EXPANSION PORTS 24x SAS 12Gb/s (4 Lane Mini-SAS HD)
SOFTWARE FEATURES SFX®, LUN Mapping and Masking, Intelligent Write Striping, Read QoS, Port Zoning Detection, Data-At-Rest Encryption, DirectProtect Data Integrity Check/Correction, Python Space API, CLUI and Web GUI, SNMP Notification
DRIVE ENCLOSURE MODELS SS8462: 4U, 84 Drive Enclosure; SS9012: 4U, 90 Drive Enclosure
SUPPORTED RAID LEVELS AND DCR CONFIGURATIONS RAID 6: 8+2, 4+2; RAID 5: 8+1, 4+1; RAID 1: 1+1

*Using SS9012 Enclosures