Research, Government & Education

Research

Government, research, and education institutions today share important challenges in organizing their IT efforts:

  • Managing a mix of application loads on a common IT infrastructure, including administrative, batch, and large scale interactive applications
  • One or more compute-intensive loads, such as analytics, modeling, or scheduling, with algorithms that demand substantial compute and I/O resources from time to time.
  • Periodic bursts of demand that are often the result of academic, governmental, or research calendars, which must be accommodated by a flexible IT infrastructure.

The need for both large-scale power and ongoing flexibility has led these institutions to become early adopters of virtualization technologies. Starting with storage area networks more than ten years ago, through the server virtualization technologies of recent years, into the latest cloud computing technologies, government research and education institutions have adopted virtualization to marshal large compute resources on demand while remaining flexible as needs change.

The virtualization of main memory is the next logical step.

MVX Memory Cloud
MVX private cloud technology creates a large distributed memory service
- a Memory Cloud - from RAM in existing servers

RNA MVX creates a memory cloud that allows for the rapid allocation of memory resources across the data center to satisfy fast-changing demands. Specific applications of RNA MVX address high-computation needs, massive databases, large-scale end-user applications, and cloud technologies. Like earlier virtualization technologies, RNA MVX aggregates capabilities from commodity hardware into a large memory cloud that can be divided logically and quickly changed to meet varying demands.

RNA MVX has particular value for the high performance computing demands in government and research settings. MVX provides a wealth of RAM resources that remove the memory limitations found in high performance systems and extend the life of existing equipment. Speed improvements of up to 20X are common using MVX. MVX is unique in consisting only of software, utilizing existing hardware without application tuning, disruptive server upgrades, or additional layers of infrastructure.

MVX Alternatives

MVX Access vs. Performance Graph
MVX provides resources with the speed of DRAM and the capacity of traditional storage solutions

The alternatives fall short of what MVX provides. SMP or global shared memory systems are costly, have scaling restrictions, and involve additional hardware that’s used for only specialized big-compute workloads. Configuring ‘fat’ nodes with large amounts of RAM is far more costly than using commodity servers, and they are again less flexible when needs change. Fast conventional storage is 100X slower than memory virtualization using MVX, while SSD is still 10X slower than MVX and is not a shared resource. MVX is a unique solution that combines commodity hardware with smart memory virtualization software to provide speed without sacrificing flexibility. MVX closely matches the needs of government, research and educational institutions.