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Today, densely deployed 1U rack servers are the instruments of choice to build an array of compute nodes for High Performance Computing (HPC) Linux clusters. Most of these servers live with Direct Attached Storage (DAS) in the form of local disks as a Storage Area Network (SAN) requires an investment in redundant Fiber channel connectivity which would drive up the procurement cost. These applications typically do not require the storage I/O performance offered by Fiber channel. The QLogic SANbox 6140 offers a cost-effective and elegant solution to route requests from iSCSI based servers to Fiber channel based disk or tape storage. The QLogic SANbox 6140 comes in a compact form factor (1/2U wide, 1U high), consumes less than 48 watts of power and is a low cost solution. Despite all this, there is no trade-off in terms of performance. The SANbox 6140 can deliver near line rate performance with 8K storage IO which is typical of most storage applications. The compact design of the SANbox 6140 allows two intelligent storage routers to be placed alongside each other in a 1U rack space. Servers can now use freely available iSCSI software initiators over the built-in Gigabit Ethernet interfaces to access Fiber channel based SAN-attached storage using the SANbox 6140 as the iSCSI to Fiber Channel router. In addition, this solution works transparently with most multi-path load balancing software products available on the market today allowing for a highly available redundant solution. In doing so, the SANbox 6140 provides a low cost way to migrate 1U rack servers from using DAS to using SAN and thus access all storage services typically deployed in a SAN. Considering that local disks typically account for most of the failures in 1U rack servers, the above solution provides a way to do away with local disks by deploying all the storage in SAN-attached Fiber channel disks which would be far more reliable and re-purposable than local disks.
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O-610-337-0262-01
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