Ibrix touts suite for clustering Linux

Ibrix is rolling out software that lets IT administrators combine I/O and storage resources into a single massive shared environment that can be managed from a central interface.

Founded in December 2000, the company is releasing its first products - Ibrix FusionFS and FusionHA, a parallel and highly available file system for clustered Linux networks.

The Fusion file system is installed on one node in a cluster of x86 servers, where it pulls together the file systems and storage capacity of each server into a pool that can be managed with the management utility, FusionMgr. For additional performance, other Ibrix Fusion servers can be added to the cluster, which share the I/O load and workload balance tasks.

The file system can scale to as much as 16 petabytes of capacity in a single namespace and provide up to 1T byte/sec of aggregate I/O throughput. As many as 8,096 servers can be clustered.

Tommy Minyard, manager of high performance computing at The University of Texas Advanced Computing Center in Austin, installed Ibrix with a 512-node Dell PowerEdge cluster and nearly 6.5 T-bytes of PowerVault 220 storage.

Minyard installed the Ibrix FusionFS on eight servers, which act as I/O engines. Each server in the cluster accesses the Ibrix file system using Network File System (NFS), Microsoft's Common Internet File System protocols or a special client software Ibrix supplies.

"We can mount the file system from NFS, which suffers from problems, or we can use the Ibrix client software," Minyard says. "We've done performance comparisons with both and using the client you get much, much better - orders of magnitude - performance."

Minyard also benefited from Ibrix when running I/O-intensive applications.

"A typical application that we have benchmarked is computational fluid dynamics," which writes out a large amount of data, Minyard says. "We went from 30 minutes to write out data to under a few minutes."

Ibrix's file system differs from others because it is software only. Systems from Panasas and Isilon are hardware-based. The Lustre File System and Red Hat's Sistina file system modify the Linux kernel and are thus more difficult to integrate, says The 451 Group, a technology analyst firm. File systems from Sun, ADIC, Veritas Software and SGI suffer from scalability issues, The 451 Group says.

"Other file systems we tried wouldn't scale beyond 128 processors, so we didn't have a good solution until Ibrix came along," Minyard says.

Ibrix's FusionHA also lets servers be failed over in the event of problems. The suite of software - FusionFS, FusionHA and FusionMgr - is designed for customers operating in cluster, grid and enterprise computing environments. It will be available later this month.