CEO (Генеральный директор) at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
Consultant
Jun 18, 2016
Both systems address the needs of HPC storage, but some significant differences are noted below:
1. The scalability of Lustre beats all other storage systems. As you can see at www.nersc.gov/assets/Uploads/W01-ZFS-and-Lustre-June-1024.pdf, the Lustre performance can be scale up to 1.5 TB/sec in the real world. The EMC Isilon performance record is much lesser because it limited by the maximum nodes number 144 (see www.emc.com/collateral/TechnicalDocument/docu65240.pdf)
2. The computing node CPU offload could be achieved with RDMA with Lustre and could not be achieved with Isilon - so the ROI of costly application software (priced per core) is much better. The CPU offload level depends of apps specifics. For example, the CPU offload for VMware ESXi with RDMA is near 90%! (see cto.vmware.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/RDMAonvSphere.pdf)
3. The EMC Isilon has a lot of functional advantages that absense in Lustre: snapshots, storage tiering, etc.
4. The EMC Isilon manageability is much better and a lot of operations done automagically. For example, the Autobalance feature (www.emc.com/collateral/white-papers/h12570-wp-isilon-onefs-job-engine.pdf) relieves the IT staff from time-consuming work of balance storage load between storage nodes (OSTs in the Lustre environment).
Our company focus is the advanced high-performance and reliable infrastructure for geological and geophysical applications (see www.netproject.ru/about_us_eng/). We will be glade to help you make the right choice for HPC storage infrastructure for your needs
Unix Systems and Storage Manager with 1,001-5,000 employees
Vendor
Jun 16, 2016
I am not certain I would put the 2 disk systems in the same space.
Sonexion is aimed at HPC workloads, and I would imagine the cost reflects that. The Lustre filesystem is a parallel architecture giving it massive scale and throughput.
EMC Isilon is what I would consider a mid range NAS with scalable performance and uses the OneFS operating system.
I would have no problem recommending either of these disk systems. One is a beast (Cray) the other is perfectly adequate (Isilon). If you require parallel access to the filesystem, the Sonexion would be the right choice.
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Both systems address the needs of HPC storage, but some significant differences are noted below:
1. The scalability of Lustre beats all other storage systems. As you can see at www.nersc.gov/assets/Uploads/W01-ZFS-and-Lustre-June-1024.pdf, the Lustre performance can be scale up to 1.5 TB/sec in the real world. The EMC Isilon performance record is much lesser because it limited by the maximum nodes number 144 (see www.emc.com/collateral/TechnicalDocument/docu65240.pdf)
2. The computing node CPU offload could be achieved with RDMA with Lustre and could not be achieved with Isilon - so the ROI of costly application software (priced per core) is much better. The CPU offload level depends of apps specifics. For example, the CPU offload for VMware ESXi with RDMA is near 90%! (see cto.vmware.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/RDMAonvSphere.pdf)
3. The EMC Isilon has a lot of functional advantages that absense in Lustre: snapshots, storage tiering, etc.
4. The EMC Isilon manageability is much better and a lot of operations done automagically. For example, the Autobalance feature (www.emc.com/collateral/white-papers/h12570-wp-isilon-onefs-job-engine.pdf) relieves the IT staff from time-consuming work of balance storage load between storage nodes (OSTs in the Lustre environment).
Our company focus is the advanced high-performance and reliable infrastructure for geological and geophysical applications (see www.netproject.ru/about_us_eng/). We will be glade to help you make the right choice for HPC storage infrastructure for your needs
I am not certain I would put the 2 disk systems in the same space.
Sonexion is aimed at HPC workloads, and I would imagine the cost reflects that. The Lustre filesystem is a parallel architecture giving it massive scale and throughput.
EMC Isilon is what I would consider a mid range NAS with scalable performance and uses the OneFS operating system.
I would have no problem recommending either of these disk systems. One is a beast (Cray) the other is perfectly adequate (Isilon). If you require parallel access to the filesystem, the Sonexion would be the right choice.