Maximum Strategy Inc has announced its 60Gb Gen 4 Storage Server based on a mixed RAID architecture and said to bridge the gap between supercomputer performance and disk storage performance. The growth of supercomputer processing power has far exceeded the growth rate of disk performance, creating an input-output bottleneck. However, by combining up to 40 disk drives operating in parallel, Gen 4 is able to provide supercomputers with faster access to data. Gen 4 is based on the company’s fourth generation of RAID technology and it can deliver up to 500 input-outputs per second using 64Kb blocks as opposed to the standard 512-byte blocks. Also, Gen 4 transfers data at 90M-bytes per second rather than 10M-bytes per second. Electronic News says that by combining up to 40 5.25 drives in a single cabinet, the cost per megabyte is only around $8. Users can choose dual-head drives from Seagate Technology Inc which offer higher speeds or the higher capacity single-head drives from Fujitsu Ltd. The system uses a Motorola 68000 processor for every two IPI-protocol channels of which there can be up to 20. All configurations offer the HIPPI interface, which simplifies communications within mixed workstation and supercomputer environments. The device uses different levels of RAID performance by supporting simultaneously levels 1, 3 and 5 within a single set of drives. Small metafiles containing file system information can be supported at RAID-1 while large sets of scientific data are handled at RAID-3, and input output intensive transaction operations are handled at RAID-5. This is claimed to eliminate the write penalties associated with RAID-3 or RAID-5. The San Jose, California-based company says that Gen-4 should be regarded as a parallel computer in which each node is concerned with moving data into and out of the system, and as such, is ideally suited to both vector and massively parallel environments. The company, which employs 27 staff, expects to report annual revenue of $10m at the end of September, and says it has shipped more than 100 Gen-3s, the previous-generation systems. Cray Computer Corp, Cray Research Inc’s Super servers arm, Convex Computer Corp, Digital Equipment Corp, Intel Corp, MasPar Computer Corp, NEC Corp and Silicon Graphics Inc are currently examining the technology for possible business relationships, and existing OEM customers of Maximum’s Gen-3 systems include IBM Corp, Cray Research and MasPar.
