Customer Stories

posted on 19 June 2008 10:59

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Qualcomm develops semiconductor chips for its wireless technology products and is using NetApp's Data ONTAP GX as the storage platform for its chipset design process.

Why?

Qualcomm is constantly developing new chip designs to enable faster and better video, audio, gaming, and location-based services for wireless devices. This involves an electronic design automation (EDA) process in which engineers run compute-intensive chip simulations. Qualcomm had enough compute power for this but, when the compute farm approached maximum utilization, it experienced a data I/O bottleneck that slowed things down and impacted the pace of engineering development.

Qualcomm implemented a NetApp GX cluster to fix this problem. GX is a clustered file system that stripes data across all available storage resources (nodes), achieving higher levels of performance. Its file system virtualization enables storage optimization and expansion, across multiple tiers, without disruption to users or applications.

Customers can scale to multiple gigabytes per second of I/O throughput and multiple petabytes of capacity - 14 with the latest release - while maintaining a single system image. They can span volumes across all system nodes, delivering increased I/O, thanks to the volume striping.

Jeff Kennedy, an IT engineer at Qualcomm, explained the firm's thinking: “We wanted to bring more projects online and not have data I/O be the bottleneck. We needed a solution that allowed us to bring more compute resources to bear on a single file system or directory structure. After testing various available options, we found that NetApp Data ONTAP GX did a great job of meeting our performance needs and providing the level of availability and failover required to maintain our rapid pace of technology development.”
“When we add more nodes to our system, Data ONTAP GX provides near-linear scaling of performance. With our four-node Data ONTAP GX cluster, we now get almost four times the I/O against a single file system or directory structure than previously. Also, with Data ONTAP GX in place we can present a single file system image spanning multiple nodes for engineering projects, allowing our engineers to run multiple simulations without noticing a performance impact.”

With the ability to seamlessly grow file systems and increase performance concurrently, Qualcomm estimates that it will be able to reduce the time spent in data administration from 40 hours to 10 hours a week with the ONTAP GX cluster.

Scale-out storage is developing fast. HP has announced its ExDS9100. EMC has its developing Infiniflex and IBM its DIV systems. FSC has just announced its CentricStor FS. This Qualcomm example of NetApp GX clustering is a timely reminder that NetApp is a strong and committed contender in this market as well.

^{[Chris Mellor.]}