SGI gets into storage management

Circuit EC / Bangalore

Think SGI and storage isn’t the first thing that comes to mind. SGI is equated with high-performance computing. That said, HPC is data intensive work and the company is putting

the experience gained while addressing customer problems with managing terabytes of data to good use. It’s offering is called CXFS. It is a high performance shared file system. In SGI’s solution, a company adds a metadata server with the master copy of CXFS on it to its existing SAN infrastructure. Each client or workstation runs a copy of the CXFS client. All data stored on the SAN is converted to the CXFS format.

“NASA has a dataset of three petabytes and its systems process two terabytes every day. This is entirely managed by CXFS,” says Avinash Fotedar, director marketing, SGI India. The cost of a ten-license implementation of CXFS, including the cost of a server would work out to Rs 25 lakh. It can process a 130 MB file in a few seconds. CXFS supports file sizes up to 9 million terabytes and filesystems to 18 million terabytes.