NEC EXPRESSCLUSTER vs. Hammerspace

NEC EXPRESSCLUSTER is a comprehensive solution designed to ensure business continuity by providing highly reliable disaster recovery and high-availability features. The software prevents data loss and reduces downtime by enabling automatic failover between clustered servers, even in the event of hardware, network, or application failures. Unlike traditional clustering solutions, EXPRESSCLUSTER does not require shared disk storage, making it a cost-effective choice for many organizations. With over 20 years in the market and more than 30,000 clusters deployed worldwide, it serves a diverse customer base across 50+ countries. The solution supports integration with a wide range of systems, including major relational databases such as Oracle DB and Microsoft SQL Server, ERP platforms like SAP, virtualization technologies like VMware and Hyper-V, and popular cloud platforms including AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. EXPRESSCLUSTER’s real-time data mirroring and failure detection mechanisms ensure that mission-critical systems experience minimal downtime. The platform’s intuitive GUI simplifies management and monitoring tasks, allowing IT teams to quickly identify and resolve issues. Numerous customers from sectors like manufacturing, finance, pharmaceuticals, and retail have credited EXPRESSCLUSTER with preventing costly outages and enabling rapid disaster recovery. This reliability translates into faster decision-making and enhanced operational efficiency. With a free 60-day trial and extensive support documentation, NEC makes it easy for businesses to evaluate and implement this proven clustering technology.

Hammerspace is an innovative storage solution that unlocks the vast amounts of fast local NVMe storage inside GPU servers, turning what was previously stranded capacity into a new ultra-fast storage tier that accelerates AI training and checkpointing. Designed to overcome the limitations of expensive and complex legacy storage systems, Hammerspace enables consistently high GPU utilization by providing low-latency, parallel access to data across thousands of servers simultaneously. The platform’s global data architecture is built on standard NFS protocols, eliminating the need for proprietary clients and simplifying integration with existing Linux storage servers and hybrid cloud environments. By orchestrating data movement between on-premises and cloud infrastructure, Hammerspace supports flexible AI workflows that maximize resource usage and minimize power consumption. Hammerspace has been proven through MLPerf benchmarks to deliver scalable, linear performance gains, dramatically speeding up checkpointing times by 10 to 100 times. Trusted by industry leaders like Meta and Los Alamos National Laboratory, it helps reduce external storage costs, power usage, and rack space requirements. The platform’s intuitive interface and rapid deployment allow organizations to bring petabytes of capacity online within days and start accelerating AI workloads immediately. Its hyperscale NAS architecture ensures consistent throughput and low latency at scale, critical for large machine learning projects. By transforming idle GPU server storage into a shared, protected resource, Hammerspace redefines cost efficiency and performance in AI infrastructure. This technology empowers data-driven organizations to innovate faster, reduce their energy footprint, and optimize their AI investment returns.