HPE is pitching high performance compute customers with hybrid configurations of its Cray Supercomputing Storage Systems built for faster throughput, along with a Rack Management Controller that monitors cooling systems. The hardware giant already supplies its Cray Supercomputing Storage Systems E2000 in all-flash, all-disk, tiered and hybrid configurations, but – we’re told – the latest combination offers up to 41 percent more data throughput per storage rack. The E2000 line embeds the Lustre open-source parallel file system, and is generally intended to fit NVMe Gen 5 solid-state drive (SSD) building blocks. For the refreshed hybrid configurations, HPE is combining SSDs with new 32 TB SAS-4 (24 Gb/s SAS) HDDs and new enclosures supporting 74 or 100 drives. HPE says it’ll deliver up to 116 GB/s of read throughput and 92 GB/s of write throughput per rack, with up to 32 percent more usable storage capacity per rack for expansion to support the growing size of datasets in HPC, especially where sites are mixing AI and traditional simulation-style workloads. One of the reasons behind these new hybrid configurations could be the ballooning cost of storage, caused by the relentless demand for AI infrastructure skewing the price of components such as memory and many other things…