Storage Partners

Cray works closely with the following partners to deliver and support all of the required storage hardware and software products for the Cray XT product family. These partners and products include:

DataDirect Networks
DataDirect Networks (DDN) is the leading data infrastructure provider for the most extreme, content-intensive environments in the world. Their S2A™ (Silicon Storage Architecture™) technology and solutions solve today's most challenging storage requirements, including providing shared, high-speed access to a common pool of data, minimizing data center footprints and storage costs for massive archives, reducing simulation computational times, and capturing and serving massive amounts of digital content. Cray currently supports the DDN S2A9900 RAID controller with both Infiniband and Fiber Channel host interfaces and support for both SAS and SATA drives.

LSI
LSI is known worldwide as a storage market leader. Their silicon-to-systems solutions empower disk drives with the intelligence, flexibility, speed and reliability needed for high-capacity storage across every market segment, from portable consumer electronics devices to personal computers to enterprise-class storage systems and networks. They were first-to-market with 4 Gb/s Fibre Channel (FC), are now delivering 8 Gb/s FC solutions, and have a leading Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) market share. Their multi-level partnerships assure innovative storage solutions that are valued by the end customer. Cray currently supports the LSI 7900 HPC RAID controller with Fiber Channel host interfaces and support for both FC and SATA drives.

Sun
Cray partners with Sun Microsystems and offers the Lustre file system as a high performance file system for Cray Supercomputers. Designed to meet the demands of the world's largest high-performance compute clusters, the Lustre file system redefines scalability and provides groundbreaking I/O and metadata throughput. An object-based cluster, Lustre currently supports tens of thousands of nodes, petabytes of data, and billions of files — and development is underway to support one million nodes, trillions of files, and zetta to yotta bytes.

QLogic
Cray uses Qlogic Fibre Channel adapters for storage connectivity in every Cray XT system. Optimized from end-to-end. From adapter to fabric. From core to edge. High-performance cluster (HPC) interconnects from QLogic create super-computing capabilities at commodity hardware costs.

Mellanox
Cray uses Mellanox ConnectX Infiniband (IB) adapters in all systems that require connectivity to IB host interfaces in RAID controllers and to external Lustre Object Storage Servers.

Cray also has relationships with the following vendors at part of our Technical Services solutions and support offerings:

BlueArc
BlueArc's goal is to provide customers with the most scalable network storage solution alongside the best total cost of ownership with superior return on investment. BlueArc's SiliconServer family offers the most scalable, highest performing network storage systems in the world. BlueArc customers benefit from lower total cost of ownership through improved productivity and efficiency derived from high data throughput, storage consolidation and the reduction of costs through simplified management.

CipherMax
The CipherMax family of high performance, enterprise-class storage security systems for tape and disk was developed in response to customer requirements for data-at-rest security solutions that support scaling from tactical deployments up to hundreds of encrypting ports; install easily and quickly into operational storage environments, with centralized administration; decurely manage up to hundreds of thousands of encryption keys with secure, automated backup for assured data recovery; and provide a future-proof migration path to integrated storage security services.

Neterion
Xframe® V-NIC™ addresses the need of high-end servers and storage systems and high-performance cluster computing users. Leveraging 30 years of Ethernet standard, Xframe V-NIC integrates seamlessly with existing IT architectures, minimizing the total cost of ownership, with an evolutionary — not a revolutionary — approach.

Quantum
The high performance alternative to NAS, Quantum StorNext® data management software enables customers to generate revenue faster and store more data at a lower cost. Combining high speed data sharing with cost effective content retention, StorNext helps customers build an infrastructure for consolidating resources so that workflow operations run faster and maintaining business assets costs less. And because data sharing and retention are combined in a single solution, there is no need to cobble together multiple products that only deliver a part of the desired functionality and may not integrate easily.