Boston Limited partners with Calxeda and Inktank to deliver transformative Ceph-based storage

St Albans, United Kingdom (October 17, 2013). Boston Limited, a leading manufacturer of high performance, low-powered server, storage and workstation solutions, is proud to announce its partnership with Calxeda and Inktank at IP EXPO 2013 that will see them deliver a transformative Ceph-based storage platform based on the Viridis ARM® platform.

Calxeda, a manufacturer of ARM® based SoC (System on Chip) technology, and Inktank, the organisation delivering Ceph: the massively scalable, open source, software-defined storage system, are working with Boston to provide the market with a transformative storage platform by optimising Ceph’s performance and stability on the ARM-based server architecture.

The system integrates the highly scalable Ceph storage system with Boston’s ultra-efficient Viridis, a self-contained, highly extensible, 48 node cluster based on Calxeda’s ARM-based EnergyCore SoC.

David Power, Head of HPC for Boston Limited, says, “The combination of Ceph and Boston’s ARM-based Viridis platform creates a storage system that fully leverages Ceph’s software-defined storage architecture and Viridis’ low-power, high density server architecture to increase scalability, manageability, reliability and significantly lower overall acquisition and operational costs. This transformative storage platform is the ideal system for tackling the challenges of use case proliferation, overall data growth explosion, and ongoing cost pressures being felt within enterprises and service providers today.”

As the Ceph architecture is designed to distribute a storage cluster over multiple servers, Boston’s Calxeda ARM-based solutions enable Ceph clusters to possess a greater number of servers, thus creating lower failure rates and more efficient healing – all within the same amount of space and at a lower power consumption level. This results the delivering of better performance-per-dollar at reduced power consumption and better rack density. With specific applications, the overall combined performance of one 2U Viridis appliance can outperform a whole rack of standard x86 servers, yet at the same time consume 1/10th the power and occupy 1/10th the space making it an excellent investment for datacentres and enterprises alike.

Steve Starbuck, Sales Director of Inktank, says, "Ceph was created to fundamentally change the economics of large-scale data storage, and running it on ultra-efficient platforms like Boston’s Viridis is a great way to do just that.  We are delighted to partner with innovative companies like Boston Limited who help us deliver transformative storage solutions using Ceph."

The Boston Viridis is a self-contained, highly extensible, 48 node ARM cluster with integral high-speed interconnect and storage. The Viridis uses the ARM® based Calxeda EnergyCore™ SoCs (Server on Chip) to create a rack-mountable 2U server cluster comprising 192 processing cores leading the way towards energy efficient hyperscale computing.