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Success Story
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Appro XtremeServer is Solid Foundation for Gear6 Integrated Server/Storage Solution |
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Download this Success Story ----
The Challenge
Delivering amazing special effects in motion pictures, accelerating the availability of financial analysis information, improving imaging land and marine subsurfaces for energy resource are a few of the challenges faced by customers of Gear6, a Mountain View, California-based Company. These customers also face, in terms of their computing environments, high service level requirements so they can take the risk of reliably processing extremely high volumes of data on a daily basis.
For example, digital effects and animated film producers, as well as companies involved in processing vast amounts of seismic data for the energy industry, struggle to maintain productivity and profitability while keeping their computing “green” – highly effective while at the same time extremely efficient in the use of power and resources.
The key to meeting the challenge of the data centers running I/O intensive applications or having strict latency requirements is to address an ever-widening “performance gap”: As CPUs and servers improve in performance with continued chip advancements such as multi-core technologies, they have out-paced the ability of disk-drives to efficiently and effectively handle the storage load.
This “Server-Storage Performance Gap” has been addressed uniquely by Gear6. Their CACHEfx appliance utilizes centralized storage caching technology to deliver the first large-capacity data center caching solution that accelerates storage and delivers real-time application performance; all as a shared network service. In this way, the reliance on traditional disc-based storage and its inherent I/O limitations can be eliminated.
“Our customers are companies such as state-of-the-art digital production studios and specialized companies engaged in high-fidelity land and marine subsurface imaging for the energy industry,” said Elliot Carpenter, VP of Finance and Operation at Gear6. “These companies need very high-end, computing-intensive environments, so they are looking for high availability, reliability, performance and quality of service. They have selected our Gear6 solution since it meets their requirements and does so in a non-disruptive, centralized and scalable manner. Gear6 sought out and selected the Appro XtremeServer™ platform to be part of our integrated solution as this allowed us to deliver what our customers need.”
The Solution
After extensive research on a variety of high-performance computing developers and their solutions, Gear6 chose to partner with Appro, and utilize one of their high-quality servers to integrate into their appliance and stand as the foundation for the CACHEfx solution.
The Appro high-density server is the critical powerhouse at the heart of CACHEfx’s ability to transform their client data center’s approach to the way data storage is architected and managed.
Their use of Gear6 Reflex OS software running on Appro XtremeServer™ platform powered by AMD Opteron™ processors allows clients to completely control which applications and storage devices they choose to accelerate, whether it be image rendering for digital film production or strategic seismic data processing. They can also boost throughput of massive amounts of data, supporting hundreds of thousands of clients simultaneously. With the resulting performance gain, latency can drop from milliseconds to microseconds.
The Results
Appro’s solution allows Gear6 to provide their clients with a unique centralized storage for caching their data center’s needs to meet the ever-growing demands for green high-capacity computing in the digital film production and energy exploration industries.
The CACHEfx appliance integrated with Appro Server’s eliminates data center bottlenecks delivering a scalable, non-disruptive and highly reliable solution. In turn, customers enjoy lowered costs, increased productivity, high resource utilization, and sustained performance as their volume of data processed on a daily basis continues to grow.
About Gear6
Gear6 accelerates storage and delivers real time performance. Addressing the widening gap between increasingly powerful servers and constrained, disk-based storage systems, Gear6 solutions eliminate bottlenecks and deliver guaranteed performance without requiring a change to current storage infrastructures. Deployed in the data center, this scalable and transparent approach centers on real time capabilities that dramatically speed up applications, provide protection from peak load disruptions, and improve quality of service. The result is powerful boost in productivity and agility for today's business needs. To learn more, go to http://www.gear6.com
About Appro
Appro is a leading developer of innovative workstations, density-managed servers, clusters and supercomputers. Appro is uniquely positioned to support High Performance Computing markets focusing on medium to large-scale deployments where lowest total cost of ownership is a primary consideration. Appro accelerates technical applications and business results unlocking the value of IT through outstanding price/performance, balanced architecture, open standards and engineering expertise.
Appro’s headquarters is in Milpitas, CA with an R&D and manufacturing partner in Asia and a sales and service office in Houston, Texas. To learn more go to www.appro.com.
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Appro is focusing its product design to address the HPC cluster
market and key customer requirements including system management,
high availability and price/performance for HPC applications.
Appro has shown the ability to win highly sought-after, large-scale
HPC deals positioning the company to benefit from strong market
growth that IDC projects through 2012.
Earl
Joseph,
IDC Program Vice President, Technical Computing
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Customer Quote
“Appro not only offered us a cost effective solution but
they also improved our required technical specification through
better reliability, greater fault tolerance and redundancy as
well as more flexibility with regards to system scalability.”
Bob Bell,
Technical Director, ING Renault F1 Team
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