BeeGFS - A Parallel Cluster Filesystem

The NEC BxFS Storage Appliance is built on BeeGFS a parallel cluster file system, designed specifically to manage I/O intensive workloads in performance-critical environments. Based on the unique NEC modular Storage Building Block concept the NEC BxFS Storage Appliance is configured in a High-Availability setup on top of ZFS.



The NEC BxFS Storage Appliance is a true software defined storage solution easing administration and maintenance as no kernel patches are required. The client is a patchless kernel module, while the server components are user space daemons. BeeOND a built-in on-demand burst buffer concept and replication feature are only some of the outstanding features of the NEC BxFS Storage Appliance.

NEC BxFS Storage Appliance BeeOND

BeeGFS on demand (BeeOND) allows on-the-fly creation of a complete, parallel file system instance on a given set of compute nodes with just one command. BeeOND is designed to integrate with cluster batch systems to create temporary, parallel file system instances on a per-job basis on internal flash devices on the compute nodes, which are part of the compute job. This provides a very fast buffer while keeping much of the I/O load for temporary, random access files away from the global cluster storage. At the beginning of a job data, can be staged from global persistent storage to the BeeOND parallel filesystem

When the job is finished, the temporary parallel filesystem will automatically be shut down, data can be staged out using a parallel copy to persistent storage before the file system will be stopped.