High Performance Computing (HPC): Seagate CSS Playbook

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Your Ticket to Success

Grow and protect existing accounts, or establish a beachhead in new accounts

– Whether it is the traditional segmentation for high performance computing (HPC) or it is in the expansion across vertical sectors of Enterprise IT, Seagate HPC solutions open doors into larger opportunities across the entire organization, creating more opportunities to sell the entire Seagate CSS portfolio.

Crush your quota more quickly – Selling HPC solution deals will help achieve your quarterly number faster. A typical ClusterStor™ deal is between $500,000 and $1.5M, which consists of 1-4 racks of storage.

Nurture for growth – As demand increases for more features, improved performance, and greater scale, the opportunity for more frequent refreshes in your customer environments becomes more prevalent.

What is the Opportunity?

According to Market Research Media, the worldwide High Performance Computing (HPC) market is expected to grow at an 8.3% CAGR reaching $44B in 2020.1_{HPC, long reserved for utilization in academia, scientific research, and} massive simulation models, now sees adoption into more traditional sectors of IT, thanks predominately to the availability of Linux clusters, processor improvements, and open source solutions.

HPC, while it may hold many monikers in enterprise IT, is used to run simulations for sport franchises, such as the Major League Baseball association and the National Football League, and it is being used to determine buying patterns, outline best practices for cross-selling, identifying customer churn rate and much more. Traditional use cases are found in determining weather patterns, climate modeling, genomic research, and processing sensor data.

Playbook

Computing (HPC):

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What is HPC?

HPC generally refers to the aggregating of compute to solve complex problems in engineering, science, and business. This typically is in reference to supercomputers, such as CRAY or IBM; however, the introduction of Linux, Linux clusters, and higher performing processors combined with open sources software solutions has created an opportunity for HPC to address other sectors of IT. HPC has most recently extended from the lab to enterprise IT organizations looking for answers in the big data it manages to make better, smarter business decisions.

Why is HPC a valued interest for Seagate?

High performance compute clusters require data to move in and out of the cluster at significant rates of performance to meet the needs of researchers, scientists, and business analysts.

The volume of data retained in these environments is large, and the resulting analysis adds to the already large volume of data stored. The HPC market, based on several sources, will approach $44B by 2020, and is estimated to generate $220B in revenues between 2015-2020.2

Investment and experience with Lustre® is growing. The Lustre® file system, which was first released in 2003, is a client/server-based, distributed architecture designed for large-scale compute and I/O-intensive, performance-sensitive applications. The Lustre® architecture currently powers some of the highest-performing compute clusters in the world. It has emerged as a particularly popular choice in the meteorology, simulation, oil and gas, life sciences, rich media, and finance sectors.

A Winning Strategy

We win with our world-class professional services.

Building on Seagate’s industry leading expertise with decades of storage innovation, our highly experienced Professional Services Consultants work hand-in-hand with our customers to identify desired business outcomes and develop optimal solutions to drive those outcomes, accelerating our customer’s Return on Investment (ROI). Our global solutions, products, and services have enabled 40% of the world’s digital information stored by Seagate for over 35 years. With experience across all industry verticals, our Seagate Professional Services team is here and ready to enable our customers to achieve the business outcomes to maintain competitiveness in the market.

Fast Facts to build your winning HPC selling strategy • Seagate brand, quality, and trust

• Easy to install and manage

• Faster time to results and productivity • Proven, sustained performance (>1 TB/sec)

• Highest performance efficiency with capacity and scale • Fully integrated and engineered Lustre® solution • Great TCO & ROI

• Competitively priced with low CAPEX and OPEX metrics

Elevator Pitch:

Seagate ClusterStor™ Parallel Storage System, built on Lustre®, and Seagate’s proven converged intelligent information infrastructure, is trusted by large organizations across the HPC community. Seagate ClusterStor™ delivers the highest performance to meet the unique storage needs in today’s most demanding compute environments. With ultra efficient scale-out storage, unprecedented levels of uptime, and the quickest time to deployment, Seagate ClusterStor™ has a lower total cost of ownership (TCO), and return on investment (ROI) with significantly lower CAPEX and OPEX metrics. By design, Seagate ClusterStor™ is an engineered solution that is fully configured, tested and validated before it ships. This means, our energy- and space-efficient solution can be implemented in hours versus days or weeks. With Seagate, the trusted leader, you will see faster time to results and productivity with the HPC industry’s highest levels of reliability, availability, and serviceability.

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HPC Market Research and Trends

According to Intersect360, the biggest budget growth area for the HPC economic segment is commercial, with a current budget growth of 4.3% and a forecasted budget growth over the next two years of 8.4%

“Intersect360 Research surveys end users on the

current year-over-year budget growth, expected

budget growth over the next 2 years, and areas

of spending change as part of our Budget

Map Survey.

Negative 3.3% growth rate in government

spending is a significant damper on the overall

HPC market. Segment is working its way up to

flat [over next 2 years].

Academia spending shows very slow growth, but

we are encouraged that it is moving in a positive

direction given the slow economic recovery and

the impact of government austerity programs

at all levels. Adding about a point of growth

[per year].

Relatively strong performance of the commercial

sector reflects the effects of continuing gains

in experience and increased confidence in

computational methods, economic advantages

to computational experimentation, and product

complexity requiring HPC solutions. Segment

growth rates are remaining stable relative to

2013.” – Intersect360

Where do we fit?

Understanding where we fit is critical to your success. Customers with challenges performing simulations, risk analysis, medical imaging, Hadoop, high-end research, sensor collection/processing, among other challenges, are all likely potential opportunities for ClusterStor™.

Door Openers

What are some of the identifying signals for a ClusterStor™ opportunity?

1. If the customer uses a high performance Linux or Linux clusters in their environment, this is a good indicator for a potential ClusterStor™ opportunity.

2. When discussing budgeted projects, listen for DDN, GPFS, Panasas, or Blue Arc as part of the discussion. If this is true, we may be a good fit with ClusterStor™ in those budgeted projects.

3. If Hadoop is part of the conversation, Hadoop Workflow Accelerator for ClusterStor™ will be a good fit as it significantly reduces time to results by enabling immediate Hadoop data processing from the start of each job, eliminating the time-consuming step of bulk loading data into an HDFS cluster.

4. If the conversation moves into discussions about parallel, large single-namespace file systems, or low-latency high throughput data intensive processing, this is a trigger to discuss ClusterStor™ and its performance scaling up to 1.7TB/sec in a single file system.

5. If there are security concerns that require multiple tiers of access, the ClusterStor™ Secure Data Appliance (SDA) may be a good fit for the prospect. Combining Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux) with Lustre® file system, the ClusterStor™ SDA is designed to deliver the industry’s first compliant and secure scale-out parallel file system solution, providing the means to implement the necessary Mandatory Access Control (MAC), explicit audit logging/ tracking, encryption, and support capabilities to enforce “least privilege” access control.

Economic Segment Y/Y Budget Growth Expected 2 year budget growth Academic 1.4% 4.8% Commercial 4.3% 8.4% Government -3.3% 1%

Questions?

Email [email protected]. The entire ClusterStor™ team is ready to help you win.

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Where to sell?

The table below outlines the target vertical markets, the use cases, and our value prop for each.

Target Vertical Market

Industry

Use Case(s)

Value Prop

Oil & Gas

Seismic processing

Reservoir simulation & modeling

Efficient, high performance compute infrastructure Engineered system

Education

University, large scale research

National labs

Weather

High performance Price sensitivity

Ease of use (rapid deployment): Faster time to research

May be price sensitive High performance compute

Time to deploy

High performance compute

Government

Geospatial intelligence Image/Signal processing NSA (Dark sites)

Performance, mission critical, world class support, security, quality

Life Sciences

Clinical

Research

Performance, quality, data integrity, security, ease of use

Ease of use, engineered system, application integration (i.e., gene sequencers)

Financial

Modeling and scenario analysis Performance, quality, scalability, low latency. Performance means money

Technical Computing (simulations)

Engineering emulation/modeling Performance (faster designs, higher quality), ISV integration, scale

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Personas – Buying Patterns

Personas

Buying Pattern(s)

CFO/SVP Finance

• Interest in budget control, maximizing investments, driving revenue with high yield solutions

• Not technical decision maker, but in many cases will influence purchases

• Typical to have CIO report to CFO or SVP of Finance in many organizations

CIO/VP, IT

• Sets strategy

• Vendor standards

• Final sign off on purchases

Business Line Manager (BLM)/ General Manager (GM)

• Owns the business

• Owns Project Scope and Management responsibilities

• Budget for HPC projects

VP Engineering, R&D, Research/ Business Analyst, Influencer

• Understands the application requirements

• Specific functionality required

IT Mgr, Data Center Operations, Technical Influencer

• Very technically motivated

• Relies on the business leadership for budget and purchases

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IT versus Business Unit Leaders: Knowing the

difference helps shorten your cycles and increase

close rate

IT Professionals

Business Unit Leaders

Manage the budget, set standards and identify approved vendors Drive revenue through new products, programs, and initiatives. On the HPC side, this leader will own the requirements and research initiatives of the projects

Pressured to “do more with less” year over year. This creates a bit of a vacuum for the professional who wants to stay informed of the latest technology, but is too often heads down being tactical rather than strategic. Individual may not know about Seagate CSS, and its portfolio of offerings.

New projects and initiatives will be budgeted and managed by this busi-ness leader. Leaders will lean on IT to help identify best of breed vendors for the project and solution.

Budgets continue to be flat to slightly increasing at about 1-2% across all sectors. According to research, the #1 IT strategy for cost containment is the purchase of new technologies with improved ROI.

Time to results, time to revenue, time to market – all of this pressure is on this leader’s shoulders to accelerate the innovation and create a better decision model for simulations, analysis, and modeling.

Data Center management and operations presents a unique opportunity for the IT professional. Reducing power/cooling needs/requirements may be a hot button and pique this professional’s interest.

Business Unit Leaders are closer to the software vendors/application providers than to the hardware/storage vendors. Leaders may not know about Seagate CSS, and its portfolio of offerings.

Questions?

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Identifying the Opportunities: What to ask

Customize your question based on vertical

Finance

Ask about simulation projects. Monte Carlo simulations, used in financial modeling, simulate various uncertainties that affect value of investments, portfolios, or instruments. Financial organizations that can come to these results more expeditiously create a competitive advantage in the market.

Oil & Gas

Ask about projects relating to seismic processing and reservoir modeling and simulation. For example, seismic processing allows researchers to use available data to create or infer what lies beneath the surface or sub-surface. Faster time to results for this type of processing helps Oil and Gas companies make faster and more accurate decisions, creating greater stakeholder value, revenue opportunities, and competitive edge.

Life Sciences Ask about clinical research projects. Clinical research allows the study of genetic diseases, for example, in the human genome, helping researchers connect or link DNA with a particular disease condition.

Universities

It is important to note that research grants to scientists from governments follow the scientists wherever they may go. When speaking to Colleges/Universities, ask about upcoming research projects, clusters, and HPC environments. Many Universities with strong research facilities will want to attract research scientists to their institutions.

General Research and Analysis

Some customers may not fit into the traditional “HPC” mold, therefore, ask if they are operating a large Linux server or Linux Cluster. Ask what kinds of projects are associated with these performance clusters. Chances are there is a ClusterStor™ opportunity here.

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Why we win

Seagate has the expertise in Lustre® with our first major install at NCSA, where the performance reached 1.1TB/ sec in 27PB’s of storage. We gain customer trust by our commitment to having 30 SW Developers on Lustre® and continuing to contribute to the OpenSource community. The quality of our solutions is based on our years of experience building high quality enclosures, tightly coupled with Seagate HDDs, for companies such as Dell, HP, and many more. Seagate’s strength lends to our success with its leadership in the industry.

• Fortune 500 Company

• First to ship over 2 billion hard drives

• World leader in hard disk drives and storage solutions • 50,000 employees, worldwide

• Trusted leader in storage and services

The quick hits on why we win

• World Class Professional Services Organization • Easy to install and manage

• Faster return on investment

• Proven, sustained performance (>1 TB/sec)

• Highest Performance Efficiency with capacity and scale • Fully integrated Lustre® solution

• Great TCO

• Competitively priced

Why we win in Weather

Vertical

Weather Service in EMEA

• The authoritative supplier of weather forecasts & information in its country • .75PB Storage with ClusterStor™ 6000

The Problem

• Customer was coping with growing data volumes and their end users were demanding greater granularity to enable more accurate forecasts. Their customers rely on them for accuracy in shipping, air travel, agriculture and daily national news. The remoteness of the region was also an issue in ensuring they had a supplier that understood their needs. In 2013 we partnered with a local reseller and held multiple calls and meetings with the client to earn their trust.

• This project was bid by Seagate through two partners. Cray won the final deal based on their compute platform.

Why We Won

• Customer chose our solution because we understood the decision makers within the account and made sure we met their needs.

• We did this through multiple interactions. We also leveraged prior Weather Services vertical wins as reference accounts and the customer contacted one of them and received positive feedback.

• We won through relationship, strong planning and continual communication to support our account strategy. • Our competition was IBM with GPFS. The team demonstrated why Lustre® was preferable over GPFS with

compelling messaging on relative performance per thread.

Drive to Success

• This was a strategic win for the region that will lead to much larger opportunities. • Success Story Status: Under NDA.

• This win will open a number of doors to the region’s federal and civil service opportunities. We have already been involved in the pre-work for the next major procurement.

• Use this to demonstrate our credibility with other federal and state weather forecasting and analysis agencies. • Contact [email protected] or [email protected] for references in this vertical.

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Why we win in Oil & Gas

Vertical

Major Oil and Gas Company

• A leader in oil and gas exploration and production has selected Seagate ClusterStor™ 6000 as a storage system provider in partnership with HP.

• Size of opportunity to Seagate: $1.7M (6.5 petabytes storage, support and services)

• With this win, we now have 2 of the Fortune 10, which represents the largest and most profitable companies in the world.

The Problem

• The customer was building a new data center in Texas, and needed a storage solution that delivered high performance, incredible storage density and easy manageability.

• A key customer requirement was the need to do remote management and monitoring since the customer wanted to perform these activities from a location outside of the data center location.

• The customer also required a solution that could eventually scale to tens of petabytes without a similar increase in support resources.

• When it came to procurement, we offered quotes via HP and another partner. HP was the selected partner.

Why We Won

• The customer chose our solution because of our product stability and the team’s deep expertise in Lustre® distributed file system technology.

• The customer was also impressed with the team’s responsiveness to supporting systems qualification and the longer-term roadmap on performance improvements and scaling. The size and stability of our systems business was a key factor as well.

Competition

• ClusterStor™ was benchmarked & won against HDS BlueArc, NetApp, Panasas and DDN. • We also competed on the Lustre® support piece against Intel Whamcloud.

• We placed an evaluation directly with the customer, and managed all technical challenges directly with their HPC team.

• One of the key challenges we hit was performance on the Halliburton (Landmark Graphics) application. We have retained a senior technologist with deep expertise in this technology to do performance testing, and we have established a technical relationship with the Landmark engineering team to support further tuning of the customer’s critical application.

Drive to Success

• Success Story Status: Can be used in NDA Customer Conversations.

• Demonstrate our Seagate success with Fortune 100 customers, Oil & Gas vertical and large enterprises. • Contact [email protected] or [email protected] for references in this vertical.

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Why we win in Life Science

Vertical

Major Children’s Hospital Research Institute

• The Research Institute is world-renown and has been leading research breakthroughs and medical innovations for more than 90 years. The Institute continues its dedication to translating innovative research findings to outstanding patient care.

• Size of opportunity to Seagate: $320K (1/2 petabyte usable storage, support and services)

• In the Healthcare and Life Sciences vertical, this win represents our second win in Healthcare Research solutions based in a hospital setting.

The Problem

• The research institute, traditionally an all EMC customer, was unable to scale its existing Isilon solution to provide enough performance to facilitate next generation genomics and proteomics workloads.

• Most of these workloads directly related to the pediatric oncology program’s needs to achieve shorter time to resolution as clinical pathways are directly linked to these results.

• Most of the workloads have very high I/O requirements.

• During the procurement process, four partners (HP, Penguin Computing, Accunet Solutions and Cambridge Computers) bid our solution. HP was awarded the business.

Why We Won

• The research institute decided to use Seagate ClusterStor™ as their HPC storage solution because of our product stability, and the team’s deep expertise in Lustre® distributed file system technology and Life Sciences workloads.

• Stability, reliability, density and TCO were key system differentiators.

Competition • We were in direct competition with EMC Isilon trying to deliver a Lustre® solution via Terascala, and Dell with a Terascala Lustre® solution.

Drive to Success

• Demonstrates our Seagate success and deep understanding of the Healthcare and Life Sciences vertical requirements.

• Contact [email protected] or [email protected] for references in this vertical.

Questions?

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Why we win in Government

Vertical

U.S. Government Agency

• An agency within the U.S. Government responsible for enhancing national security through the application of nuclear science. The project under this will support all three of the national laboratories, which include Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), Sandia National Laboratories (SNL) and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL).

• The project is sized to run the largest and most demanding simulations of stockpile stewardship, assuring the safety, security, and effectiveness of the U.S. nuclear deterrent without the use of underground testing. • Size of opportunity to Seagate: $11.4M (2nd half CY2015 is 82PB useable, approximately 1.7TB/sec).

• This will be the fastest single site installation of Sonexion storage deployed. NCSA’s (today’s largest) approximate performance is 1.1TB/sec based on the Sonexion 1600 while this new project will be 50% faster based on Sonexion 2000 (over 1.7TB/sec).

• This is also the largest capacity single site installation of Sonexion storage deployed. • Cray customer site SS-713 (today’s largest) has 23PB usable storage (31PB raw). • The project installation will nearly quadruple this amount.

• The overall solution includes ClusterStor™ 9000 (228 units) with 18,696 6TB SAS HDDs, 264 Enterprise HDDs, and 456 SSDs—all Seagate.

The Problem

• LANL is looking for a compute/storage platform to sustain their data intense weapons simulations. Cray put together a compute system for these simulations and also needed 82PB of storage to meet LANL’s need. • During the procurement process, Cray originally bid DDN storage in the first round and then Cray positioned

Sonexion (Seagate ClusterStor™) as the best storage solution, offering more capacity and performance in a reduced footprint.

Why We Won

• Sonexion storage uses less power and produces less heat dissipation while providing the requested usable capacity and extreme performance—ensuring greater power efficiency and reducing the environmental impact while providing a lower TCO (lower power usage saves on power/air conditioning monthly bills).

• 82PB of usable storage (112PB raw) in 38 racks used approximately 50% fewer units and approximately 60% less power than DDN—compacting the usable, high-availability capacity into less space and providing more room for expansion.

• Leveraged the success of a similar solution with 36 racks (~26PB usable, 35PB raw, 1.1TB/sec)installation at NCSA.

Competition • DDN competed for this business, but was unable to compare to our solution using 50% fewer units and _{consuming 60% less power than DDN.}

Drive to Success

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Handling Objections

Objections are bound to happen. Understanding why they come up is almost as important as how you respond. Knowing your customer’s mindset and the challenges and pressures they face will help build the relationship and foster trust.

Overcoming Objections

When did Seagate get into the high performance computing business? Seagate acquired Xyratex in December of 2013. IDC recently ranked Xyratex as the top provider of OEM disk storage solutions for the 5th consecutive year. Its ClusterStor™ hardware has been a key asset for enterprises that need to run demanding applications, and the company’s product portfolio includes solutions for disk processing, testing and inspection. Seagate ClusterStor™ is in use at some of the largest high performance compute environments in the world.

HPC is too expensive—we aren’t the size of some of the big laboratories. Seagate ClusterStor™ is configured to fit many customer requirements. We design our systems to meet your workload requirements.

ClusterStor™ 1500 is a great scale out entry point for environments with performance workload requirements up to 110GB/sec. You can start at a small 30TB of raw storage and expand as needed—up to 5.3PB of raw capacity.

We don’t have any high performance computers in our environment, only Linux clusters for Hadoop.

Many people believe you have to own a supercomputer to be performing high performance computations. The reality is, many customers are running either a very large Linux server or a Linux cluster. Seagate has a solution for Hadoop; it is our Hadoop Workflow Accelerator. This solution allows you to streamline your map and reduce functions by eliminating the need to use HDFS in your environment which requires you to move your data between your storage tiers for processing.

Steve Conway, VP, HPC at IDC Research, said, “Data-intensive computing has long been a part of HPC, but newer analytical approaches using Hadoop and other methods, such as graph analytics, will help drive strong growth in high performance data analysis, which is the market for Big Data needing HPC. The Hadoop Workflow Accelerator is designed to serve both the technical computing and commercial sides of this converging Big Data-HPC market that IDC forecasts will exceed $4 billion in 2018. IDC research shows that 29% of HPC sites already use Hadoop. The market will welcome tools that boost Hadoop performance and efficiency.”

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seagate.com

AMERICAS Seagate Technology LLC 10200 South De Anza Boulevard, Cupertino, California 95014, United States, 408-658-1000 ASIA/PACIFIC Seagate Singapore International Headquarters Pte. Ltd. 7000 Ang Mo Kio Avenue 5, Singapore 569877, 65-6485-3888 EUROPE, MIDDLE EAST AND AFRICA Seagate Technology SAS 16–18, rue du Dôme, 92100 Boulogne-Billancourt, France, 33 1-4186 10 00

ClusterStor™ Resources

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ClusterStor Parallel Storage System Overview ClusterStor 9000 datasheet

ClusterStor 6000 datasheet ClusterStor 1500 datasheet

ClusterStor Secure Data Appliance (SDA) datasheet ClusterStor Hadoop Workflow Accelerator

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Executive Briefs

It’s Not How Much Storage You’ve Got, It’s How You Use It: HPC Storage & Data Center Efficiency

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The Metric That Matters for Analyzing HPC Storage Performance

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