SGI to preview In-Memory Appliance

SGI will preview a single-node appliance at the SAPPHIRE® NOW conference being held June 3-5 in Orlando, Florida. Building on SGI’s in-memory computing leadership and SGI’s January development announcement for the SAP HANA® platform, the forthcoming solution is expected to enable real-time business at extreme scale and high availability, without complexity.

Utilising a scale-up, single-node architecture with breakthrough coherent shared memory, the appliance is being built to enable organisations to run enterprise resource planning (ERP), data warehouse, and other applications on a single, in-memory system and scale beyond 6TB. Freed from the limits and complexity of clustered appliances, large enterprises across industries will be able to perform analytics, transactions, and processes in real time for faster, smarter decisions and greater competitive advantage.

• Bankers can view customers holistically to enhance long term value;
• Manufacturers have real-time knowledge of operations to optimise costs and assets;
• Retailers can consolidate point of sale (POS), e-commerce, and ERP data for a 360-degree view of customer activity;
• Healthcare organisations can analyse clinical data from greater sample sizes to improve patient care.

The SGI appliance will feature a new offering in the SGI UV server line designed for in-memory data management and application platforms, and leverages seventh generation SGI technology and over 100 SGI patents in shared-memory innovation. The first release of the appliance will contain an 8-socket UV system utilising Intel® Xeon® E7 8890 v2 processors coupled with 6TB of shared memory that is designed to scale to 32 sockets and 24TB of shared memory as a single-node system. By simply adding sockets and memory, enterprises will be able to expand their platform seamlessly and overcome the performance degradation and complexity challenges of clustered solutions. Performance will scale linearly, automatically, and without need to re-distribute data or balance I/O.

Shared memory communication within the appliance will be achieved using ultra-fast, low latency SGI NUMAlink® 7 interconnects. To protect data against memory power loss, data and log files will be stored on disk using dual NetApp® E2700 RAID arrays. And to further simplify deployment and accelerate time to value, the appliance will arrive pre-racked and pre-configured with SUSE® Linux® Enterprise Server.

High Availability
To fulfil the uptime demands of global, online environments, maintain high service levels, and guard against costly downtime, the appliance will provide high availability with simplified administration. Utilising two single-node systems, enterprises will be protected against logical, system, and site failure, and restore critical applications and data analytics in seconds.

“Large enterprises are striving for the performance and simplicity of single node systems beyond the current threshold for an appliance running SAP HANA,” said Jorge Titinger, president and CEO of SGI. “Drawing on the experience gained in the delivery of hundreds of shared-memory solutions to HPC customers, SGI is designing a single-node system with unprecedented scale that will enable our customers to confidently leverage the full power of SAP HANA to achieve their business objectives.”