Nexsan’s Assureon Secure Disk Archive Delivers Uncompromised Value with Primary Storage Performance
Companies are faced with a wave of complexity in trying to make sense of tiered storage: complex storage infrastructures, storage management and regulatory compliance requirements. Imagine a single box solution that could consolidate storage tiers, guarantee data protection, simplify storage management and lower storage costs. There’s no need to imagine any more as Nexsan’s Assureon Secure Disk Archive delivers uncompromised value with primary storage performance and cost-efficient management of your most infrequently accessed files. Assureon redefines what archive means.
The complexities of the traditional storage infrastructure along with its management and cost combine to make an unforgiving challenge for IT. How chaotic can all of this complexity be? Administrators must be able to budget for massive storage capacity growth and plan for multiple layers of infrastructure overflowing with:
• disk arrays;
• backup servers;
• data deduplication appliances and other equipment;
• a variety of protocols and physical interfaces;
• hundreds of storage management applications, each with its own software interface, none operationally integrated with another;
• dozens of different vendors and pricing permutations
What if all this chaos of complexity could be replaced with a single, small solution that dramatically simplifies the infrastructure, automates management and improves data security while significantly driving down your storage costs?
Nexsan’s Assureon Secure Disk Archive redefines what archive means. With the most innovative thinking in an archive, Assureon leverages a new approach to storage consolidation and automated management that changes how an entire storage infrastructure can be deployed and managed. By combining speeds rivaling primary storage performance with the ability to manage infrequently accessed files on “deep sleep”, cost-efficient drives, Assureon is the picture of uncompromised value.
To view this white paper in its entirety at no charge, please select the following link: http://www.nexsan.com/whitepapers/No_More_Tiers_with_Assureon.pdf
Thursday, June 17, 2010
Free White Paper Download: The Digital Age Trapped in an 8 Track World, Eliminate Tape with Assureon
The Assureon disk archive overcomes performance and data integrity issues related to tape archiving while greatly reducing cost and complexity with infrastructure consolidation and automated management.
Tape has been a standard data storage medium for more than 50 years, but that era is winding down. The capabilities of tape have been outpaced by mammoth increases in corporate data, the recovery and data integrity demands of regulatory compliance and the challenge of simplifying, automating and consolidating the data protection infrastructure in a restrictive IT budget environment.
The Assureon disk archive overcomes all the nagging performance and data integrity issues related to tape archiving while greatly reducing cost and complexity with infrastructure consolidation and automated management.
Magnetic tape as a data storage technology is approaching the end of its useful life. In the past, the limited volume of data made tape sensible, however, its functionality has been overrun by historic data growth and a new IT budget reality that is forcing storage administrators to adopt new solutions that lower the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for storage.
Tape simply cannot measure up to today’s standards for reliable, secure, simplified, cost-effective storage while meeting an organization’s performance requirements. Nexsan’s Assureon secure disk archive is a state-of-the art archival storage solution that innovates where tape stagnates for fast, reliable, secure storage. Going forward, tape may still exist to be tucked away inside a mountain, or for data portability, but even those days are limited.
Assureon brings a competitive edge for companies looking to get rid of the storage headaches that come with tape systems. Moreover, for any organization that has data that demands guarantees, no other storage solution will make you feel safer and more at ease about your protection architecture than Assureon. If data protection risks within your current storage infrastructure have ever kept you up at night, Assureon will ensure that you never worry about the risk of data loss again.
With Assureon, Nexsan has established a best practice model on how data archiving and protection should be deployed. Nexsan’s “simpler is better” concept improves the performance, security and reliability of archival storage with infrastructure consolidation and simplified storage management to create the type of storage cost reductions and efficiencies required of IT professionals.
To read the remainder of this story, please visit:
http://www.nexsan.com/whitepapers/eliminate_tape_with_Assureon.pdf
Tape has been a standard data storage medium for more than 50 years, but that era is winding down. The capabilities of tape have been outpaced by mammoth increases in corporate data, the recovery and data integrity demands of regulatory compliance and the challenge of simplifying, automating and consolidating the data protection infrastructure in a restrictive IT budget environment.
The Assureon disk archive overcomes all the nagging performance and data integrity issues related to tape archiving while greatly reducing cost and complexity with infrastructure consolidation and automated management.
Magnetic tape as a data storage technology is approaching the end of its useful life. In the past, the limited volume of data made tape sensible, however, its functionality has been overrun by historic data growth and a new IT budget reality that is forcing storage administrators to adopt new solutions that lower the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for storage.
Tape simply cannot measure up to today’s standards for reliable, secure, simplified, cost-effective storage while meeting an organization’s performance requirements. Nexsan’s Assureon secure disk archive is a state-of-the art archival storage solution that innovates where tape stagnates for fast, reliable, secure storage. Going forward, tape may still exist to be tucked away inside a mountain, or for data portability, but even those days are limited.
Assureon brings a competitive edge for companies looking to get rid of the storage headaches that come with tape systems. Moreover, for any organization that has data that demands guarantees, no other storage solution will make you feel safer and more at ease about your protection architecture than Assureon. If data protection risks within your current storage infrastructure have ever kept you up at night, Assureon will ensure that you never worry about the risk of data loss again.
With Assureon, Nexsan has established a best practice model on how data archiving and protection should be deployed. Nexsan’s “simpler is better” concept improves the performance, security and reliability of archival storage with infrastructure consolidation and simplified storage management to create the type of storage cost reductions and efficiencies required of IT professionals.
To read the remainder of this story, please visit:
http://www.nexsan.com/whitepapers/eliminate_tape_with_Assureon.pdf
Tuesday, June 8, 2010
The Guide To Green Storage – Free Download
Maximizing Storage Power Efficiency without Sacrificing Performance
Waste. It’s what your data center is making of your energy and money right now with today’s storage arrays. By the time you finish this 10 minute white paper, the storage infrastructure within your data center will have just pushed up to 70% more carbon into the atmosphere, consumed up to 70% more power and up to 70% more cooling than it needed to. Over a year, a typical 42TB storage solution will push 8.9 metric tons of CO2 into the atmosphere that otherwise could have been COMPLETELY eliminated by a power efficient storage subsystem that meets or exceeds ALL the same performance, reliability and cost requirements demanded by your business.
It’s easy to ‘tune out’ those kinds of talking points as IT professionals have grown more and more cynical of vendor marketing that always seems to over-promise and under-deliver. But if green initiatives play a role in your organization’s priorities, power consumption solutions to the storage infrastructure are one of the easiest to implement and, thus, belong at the top of IT.
View this paper in its entirety at http://www.nexsan.com/whitepapers/Nexsan_WhitePaper_Green_Storage_Guide_GA122409-A.pdf
Additionally, for a comprehensive comparison of midrange storage arrays, visit the Data Center Infrastructure Group (DCIG) and download the free Midrange Array Buyer’s Guide at http://www.dciginc.com/2010/06/free-download-dcig-midrange-array-buyers-guide.html
Waste. It’s what your data center is making of your energy and money right now with today’s storage arrays. By the time you finish this 10 minute white paper, the storage infrastructure within your data center will have just pushed up to 70% more carbon into the atmosphere, consumed up to 70% more power and up to 70% more cooling than it needed to. Over a year, a typical 42TB storage solution will push 8.9 metric tons of CO2 into the atmosphere that otherwise could have been COMPLETELY eliminated by a power efficient storage subsystem that meets or exceeds ALL the same performance, reliability and cost requirements demanded by your business.
It’s easy to ‘tune out’ those kinds of talking points as IT professionals have grown more and more cynical of vendor marketing that always seems to over-promise and under-deliver. But if green initiatives play a role in your organization’s priorities, power consumption solutions to the storage infrastructure are one of the easiest to implement and, thus, belong at the top of IT.
View this paper in its entirety at http://www.nexsan.com/whitepapers/Nexsan_WhitePaper_Green_Storage_Guide_GA122409-A.pdf
Additionally, for a comprehensive comparison of midrange storage arrays, visit the Data Center Infrastructure Group (DCIG) and download the free Midrange Array Buyer’s Guide at http://www.dciginc.com/2010/06/free-download-dcig-midrange-array-buyers-guide.html
Monday, June 7, 2010
DCIG Announces Free Download of First-of-its-Kind 2010 DCIG Midrange Array Buyer’s Guide.
Comprehensive report weighs, scores and ranks over 70 midrange arrays from more than 20 different data storage providers. Access the new report at www.nexsan.com/DCIG_Buyers_Guide
NEWS BULLETIN
The Data Center Infrastructure Group (DCIG), an independent analyst firm, has just released a first-ever competitive review of its kind with the 2010 DCIG Midrange Array Buyer's Guide. This comprehensive report weighs, scores and ranks over 70 midrange arrays from more than 20 different data storage providers. Access the new report at www.nexsan.com/DCIG_Buyers_Guide
The 105-page report goes far beyond most consumer guides in both detail and scope to provide granular information that end-users need to know when comparing competitive solutions. This independent analysis is prepared from a "user's perspective" and fully discloses what factors were taken into consideration when arriving at its recommendations. As a wholly objective report, none of the 21 reflected storage vendors had any influence on the findings within the guide. Nexsan is making the guide available for a limited time in order to promote balanced and fair competitive evaluations.
IT professionals will find the guide a valuable resource for determining the top midrange storage array options for their computing environments and according to DCIG, “The Guide cuts through the hype in the storage industry and removes much of the fuzziness that is often found in other analyst reports as it ranks all of the midrange arrays from #1 down to #72.”
This Buyer's Guide lists winners and losers in the mid and is a valuable asset that allows users to do side-by-side comparisons so they are clear in their choices of the most appropriate storage with respect to application or computing requirements.
www.nexsan.com/DCIG_Buyers_Guide
NEWS BULLETIN
The Data Center Infrastructure Group (DCIG), an independent analyst firm, has just released a first-ever competitive review of its kind with the 2010 DCIG Midrange Array Buyer's Guide. This comprehensive report weighs, scores and ranks over 70 midrange arrays from more than 20 different data storage providers. Access the new report at www.nexsan.com/DCIG_Buyers_Guide
The 105-page report goes far beyond most consumer guides in both detail and scope to provide granular information that end-users need to know when comparing competitive solutions. This independent analysis is prepared from a "user's perspective" and fully discloses what factors were taken into consideration when arriving at its recommendations. As a wholly objective report, none of the 21 reflected storage vendors had any influence on the findings within the guide. Nexsan is making the guide available for a limited time in order to promote balanced and fair competitive evaluations.
IT professionals will find the guide a valuable resource for determining the top midrange storage array options for their computing environments and according to DCIG, “The Guide cuts through the hype in the storage industry and removes much of the fuzziness that is often found in other analyst reports as it ranks all of the midrange arrays from #1 down to #72.”
This Buyer's Guide lists winners and losers in the mid and is a valuable asset that allows users to do side-by-side comparisons so they are clear in their choices of the most appropriate storage with respect to application or computing requirements.
www.nexsan.com/DCIG_Buyers_Guide
Thursday, May 27, 2010
Caltech Spitzer Science Center Reduces Storage Management and Costs for Two Petabytes of NASA Data with Nexsan Storage
Nexsan Storage Systems Selected for Storage of Space Image Data
Nexsan, a leading storage system provider, today announced that the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) Spitzer Science Center (SSI) is meeting its data storage challenges by using Nexsan SATABoy® and SATABeast® storage systems. SSI has decreased storage management and maintenance costs of two petabytes of data by employing Nexsan’s storage systems. The resulting savings have enabled better resource utilization for other strategic projects surrounding this important NASA mission.
The Spitzer Space Telescope (formerly the Space Infrared Telescope Facility, or SIRTF) was launched into space by a Delta rocket from Cape Canaveral, Fla., on August 25, 2003. Throughout its mission of discovery, Spitzer has obtained images and spectra by detecting the infrared energy, or heat, radiated by objects in space. These images have enabled visibility into regions of star formation, the centers of galaxies, and newly forming planetary systems.
The storage of these unique and research-critical images is managed by Caltech, and SSI consulted with ESS Direct to select a combination of Nexsan SATABeast and SATABoy RAID storage systems for their reliability, cost efficiency and simplified operation. During each new Spitzer research activity, SSI stores approximately 100 TB of images in its Nexsan storage environment, which today is composed of more than 2,000 drives, 130 controllers and 65 chassis.
“In choosing a storage vendor, we wanted to reduce storage costs, but we also needed very reliable technology to reduce IT resource drain,” said Eugean Hacopians, senior systems engineer, Caltech SSI. “It’s understood that one of the best ways to shrink storage management costs is to reduce system and component failures so that IT professionals are not relegated to servicing equipment.”
“We’ve had petabytes of data stored on our Nexsan systems for more than seven years and have experienced excellent reliability. The systems have helped reduce storage maintenance costs, which are less than what they might have been with alternative systems,” added Hacopians.
Learn more about the entire Nexsan product line at nexsan.com/products.php.
About the Spitzer Space Telescope
JPL manages the Spitzer mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, DC. Science operations are conducted at the Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology campus in Pasadena, Calif. Caltech manages JPL for NASA. For more information, see spitzer.caltech.edu.
About Nexsan
Nexsan Corporation is a leading provider of energy-efficient, long-term storage systems. Nexsan delivers secure storage appliances and modular, capacity-optimized disk-storage systems for a broad range of applications including fixed content storage and archiving, email, medical imaging, compliance and litigation support, disk-based backup, digital video security, and rich media. Nexsan’s solutions are the choice of small and medium-sized companies as well as large global enterprises and major governmental agencies around the world that are seeking cost-correct, high-density storage solutions. Founded in 1999 and based in Thousand Oaks, California, Nexsan sells its products exclusively through a select global network of VARs, OEMs and system integrators. For more information, please see the company’s website at nexsan.com.
END
Nexsan Technologies is a registered trademark and AutoMAID is a trademark of Nexsan. All other product or company names mentioned herein are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.
Nexsan, a leading storage system provider, today announced that the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) Spitzer Science Center (SSI) is meeting its data storage challenges by using Nexsan SATABoy® and SATABeast® storage systems. SSI has decreased storage management and maintenance costs of two petabytes of data by employing Nexsan’s storage systems. The resulting savings have enabled better resource utilization for other strategic projects surrounding this important NASA mission.
The Spitzer Space Telescope (formerly the Space Infrared Telescope Facility, or SIRTF) was launched into space by a Delta rocket from Cape Canaveral, Fla., on August 25, 2003. Throughout its mission of discovery, Spitzer has obtained images and spectra by detecting the infrared energy, or heat, radiated by objects in space. These images have enabled visibility into regions of star formation, the centers of galaxies, and newly forming planetary systems.
The storage of these unique and research-critical images is managed by Caltech, and SSI consulted with ESS Direct to select a combination of Nexsan SATABeast and SATABoy RAID storage systems for their reliability, cost efficiency and simplified operation. During each new Spitzer research activity, SSI stores approximately 100 TB of images in its Nexsan storage environment, which today is composed of more than 2,000 drives, 130 controllers and 65 chassis.
“In choosing a storage vendor, we wanted to reduce storage costs, but we also needed very reliable technology to reduce IT resource drain,” said Eugean Hacopians, senior systems engineer, Caltech SSI. “It’s understood that one of the best ways to shrink storage management costs is to reduce system and component failures so that IT professionals are not relegated to servicing equipment.”
“We’ve had petabytes of data stored on our Nexsan systems for more than seven years and have experienced excellent reliability. The systems have helped reduce storage maintenance costs, which are less than what they might have been with alternative systems,” added Hacopians.
Learn more about the entire Nexsan product line at nexsan.com/products.php.
About the Spitzer Space Telescope
JPL manages the Spitzer mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, DC. Science operations are conducted at the Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology campus in Pasadena, Calif. Caltech manages JPL for NASA. For more information, see spitzer.caltech.edu.
About Nexsan
Nexsan Corporation is a leading provider of energy-efficient, long-term storage systems. Nexsan delivers secure storage appliances and modular, capacity-optimized disk-storage systems for a broad range of applications including fixed content storage and archiving, email, medical imaging, compliance and litigation support, disk-based backup, digital video security, and rich media. Nexsan’s solutions are the choice of small and medium-sized companies as well as large global enterprises and major governmental agencies around the world that are seeking cost-correct, high-density storage solutions. Founded in 1999 and based in Thousand Oaks, California, Nexsan sells its products exclusively through a select global network of VARs, OEMs and system integrators. For more information, please see the company’s website at nexsan.com.
END
Nexsan Technologies is a registered trademark and AutoMAID is a trademark of Nexsan. All other product or company names mentioned herein are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.
Thursday, November 19, 2009
Nexsan Expands Highly Efficient Storage with 84TB SATABeast
Storage System Doubles Capacity in 4U of Rack Space For Greater Power, Space and Cost Efficiency
Thousand Oaks, Calif., - Nexsan, a leading storage system provider today announced at the company’s NexStep EMEA VAR conference that it has doubled the capacity of the award-winning SATABeast™ storage system from 42TB to 84TB in only four units (4U) of rack space. Built to provide the best power efficiency and space efficiency in the industry along with meaningful cost efficiency, the SATABeast enables midsized organizations to achieve both exceptional capital and operational cost savings. The highly efficient SATABeast is the ultimate solution for data intensive storage applications that require 24x7 online data access.
The Nexsan SATABeast is an enterprise-class RAID system designed to deliver exceptional performance, reliability and simplified operation in a very dense storage footprint. With a customer reported system reliability rating of more than 99.9%, the high density SATABeast is the premier option for both primary and secondary storage applications, including content archiving, disaster recovery and disk-based backup.
The system’s chassis design reduces hard drive stress with unique anti-accumulative rotational vibration and horizontal midplane cooling technology supporting one of the lowest storage system maintenance rates in the industry. As with all of the company’s storage systems, the Nexsan SATABeast features AutoMAID™ (Automatic Massive Array of Idle Disks) technology for policy-based power management that cuts energy demands up to 70% without impacting storage performance.
“Midsize organizations are challenged with continued data growth and seek solutions that not only reduce upfront costs but also lower day-to-day operating expenses. They want to use systems that provide greater power, space and cost efficiencies to drive down their total costs of ownership,” said Mark Peters, Senior Analyst for the Enterprise Strategy Group. “Nexsan’s latest generation of products, including the enhanced SATABeast, reflects the company’s steadfast commitment to deliver such improvements; with capabilities that will help their customers to save money - and their partners to compete - in today’s challenging economy and beyond.”
Key features of the enhanced SATABeast include:
• Up to 84TB of native capacity in only 4U
• Power efficient AutoMAID technology for greatly reduced power consumption
• Dual-function Fibre Channel and iSCSI connectivity with wire-speed performance
• Flexible, scalable and completely OS independent storage system for supporting a broad range of storage infrastructures
• Support for RAID 0, 1, 1+0, 4, 5 and 6
• Worldview™ single GUI interface for simplified management
“Customers are seeking solutions that achieve capital and operational savings and the enhanced SATABeast is specifically designed to deliver these benefits with power efficient, space efficient and cost efficient technologies,” said Bob Woolery, Senior Vice President, Marketing for Nexsan. “We invite customers to unleash the capacity and power of the SATABeast for their data intensive applications and benefit from technology that is proven in thousands of deployments worldwide.”
Pricing and Availability
The Nexsan SATABeast is available immediately through the company’s worldwide channel network. Pricing for a fully populated SATABeast with 2TB drives starts at $38,000 and scales based on configuration options.
Storage industry VARs, resellers and service providers interested in learning more about partnering with Nexsan should visit http://www.nexsan.com/reseller_signup.php .
About Nexsan Technologies
Nexsan Corporation is a leading provider of energy-efficient, long-term storage systems. Nexsan delivers secure storage appliances and modular, capacity-optimized disk-storage systems for a broad range of applications including fixed content storage and archiving, email, medical imaging, compliance and litigation support, disk-based backup, digital video security, and rich media. Nexsan's solutions are the choice of small and medium-sized companies as well as large global enterprises and major governmental agencies around the world who are seeking cost-correct, high density storage solutions. Founded in 1999 and based in Thousand, Oaks, Calif., Nexsan sells its products exclusively through a select global network of VARs, OEMs and system integrators. For more information, please see the company's website at nexsan.com.
END
*A trademark or trade name of an entity other than Nexsan Technologies, Inc.
Thousand Oaks, Calif., - Nexsan, a leading storage system provider today announced at the company’s NexStep EMEA VAR conference that it has doubled the capacity of the award-winning SATABeast™ storage system from 42TB to 84TB in only four units (4U) of rack space. Built to provide the best power efficiency and space efficiency in the industry along with meaningful cost efficiency, the SATABeast enables midsized organizations to achieve both exceptional capital and operational cost savings. The highly efficient SATABeast is the ultimate solution for data intensive storage applications that require 24x7 online data access.
The Nexsan SATABeast is an enterprise-class RAID system designed to deliver exceptional performance, reliability and simplified operation in a very dense storage footprint. With a customer reported system reliability rating of more than 99.9%, the high density SATABeast is the premier option for both primary and secondary storage applications, including content archiving, disaster recovery and disk-based backup.
The system’s chassis design reduces hard drive stress with unique anti-accumulative rotational vibration and horizontal midplane cooling technology supporting one of the lowest storage system maintenance rates in the industry. As with all of the company’s storage systems, the Nexsan SATABeast features AutoMAID™ (Automatic Massive Array of Idle Disks) technology for policy-based power management that cuts energy demands up to 70% without impacting storage performance.
“Midsize organizations are challenged with continued data growth and seek solutions that not only reduce upfront costs but also lower day-to-day operating expenses. They want to use systems that provide greater power, space and cost efficiencies to drive down their total costs of ownership,” said Mark Peters, Senior Analyst for the Enterprise Strategy Group. “Nexsan’s latest generation of products, including the enhanced SATABeast, reflects the company’s steadfast commitment to deliver such improvements; with capabilities that will help their customers to save money - and their partners to compete - in today’s challenging economy and beyond.”
Key features of the enhanced SATABeast include:
• Up to 84TB of native capacity in only 4U
• Power efficient AutoMAID technology for greatly reduced power consumption
• Dual-function Fibre Channel and iSCSI connectivity with wire-speed performance
• Flexible, scalable and completely OS independent storage system for supporting a broad range of storage infrastructures
• Support for RAID 0, 1, 1+0, 4, 5 and 6
• Worldview™ single GUI interface for simplified management
“Customers are seeking solutions that achieve capital and operational savings and the enhanced SATABeast is specifically designed to deliver these benefits with power efficient, space efficient and cost efficient technologies,” said Bob Woolery, Senior Vice President, Marketing for Nexsan. “We invite customers to unleash the capacity and power of the SATABeast for their data intensive applications and benefit from technology that is proven in thousands of deployments worldwide.”
Pricing and Availability
The Nexsan SATABeast is available immediately through the company’s worldwide channel network. Pricing for a fully populated SATABeast with 2TB drives starts at $38,000 and scales based on configuration options.
Storage industry VARs, resellers and service providers interested in learning more about partnering with Nexsan should visit http://www.nexsan.com/reseller_signup.php .
About Nexsan Technologies
Nexsan Corporation is a leading provider of energy-efficient, long-term storage systems. Nexsan delivers secure storage appliances and modular, capacity-optimized disk-storage systems for a broad range of applications including fixed content storage and archiving, email, medical imaging, compliance and litigation support, disk-based backup, digital video security, and rich media. Nexsan's solutions are the choice of small and medium-sized companies as well as large global enterprises and major governmental agencies around the world who are seeking cost-correct, high density storage solutions. Founded in 1999 and based in Thousand, Oaks, Calif., Nexsan sells its products exclusively through a select global network of VARs, OEMs and system integrators. For more information, please see the company's website at nexsan.com.
END
*A trademark or trade name of an entity other than Nexsan Technologies, Inc.
Thursday, October 15, 2009
Petabyte Explosion: How Caltech Manages to Manage Billions of Files
Managing billions of small files effectively requires a clear understanding of data flows and a system based on common Lego-like building blocks that provide services to application owners.
This was the message at the September 29th, 2009 Peer Incite Research Meeting, where an industry practitioner, Eugene Hacopians, Senior Systems Engineer at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), addressed the Wikibon community.
Caltech is the academic home of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. As such it runs the downlink for the Spitzer Space Telescope, NASA's orbital space telescope, as well as 13 other missions, processes the raw data into images, and supports the needs of scientists visiting from locations worldwide. The focus of this discussion was the activities of the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC), which has evolved to become the national archive for infrared analysis from telescopic space missions.
To be sure, Caltech's needs are on the edge. The organization is the steward for more than 2.3 petabytes of data created from its 14 currently active missions. Caltech captures data from these missions and performs intense analysis in what it calls its 'Sandbox', a server and storage infrastructure that supports scientific applications that analyze the data. Once 'crunched,' the data is moved to an archive, using homegrown data movement software.
The team at Caltech had to design a cost-effective means of providing reliable data access to all this scientific data. As well, organizationally, the projects supported by Caltech had to be completely walled from each other from an accounting standpoint. Rather than implement a shared SAN infrastructure with onerous chargeback mechanisms, Caltech decided to use a common set of technologies that would support each of the projects. The technological building blocks are:
A Sun Solaris server running the ZFS file system, A QLogic 5602 FC switch, One-to-three Nexsan SATA Beast arrays.
Caltech uses Nexsan's Automaid spindown capabilities in its archive to reduce energy costs, using Level 1 (slowing the spin speed of the disk) and Level 2 (parking the heads after sufficient inactivity). It does not put the drives into sleep mode (Level 3) and has never had reliability problems associated with spinning down devices.
Caltech uses SAIC tape for long term archiving and last resort off-site disaster recovery. However, its own tests indicate that because of the huge number of small files involved, recovery from tape would take weeks or longer.
This building block approach has allowed Caltech to use common configurations across its infrastructure. Caltech derives four main benefits from this strategy:
1.The infrastructure is architected for fast, simple, safe recovery from failure or data loss.
2.The approach scales nicely in support of Caltech's data growth, which occurs in large chunks of hundreds of TB's and billions of tiles at a time.
3.It streamlines staff training.
4.The "Lego" building-block method allows Caltech to reuse infrastructure when it comes off maintenance, providing it with large numbers of spares and saving money.
Caltech uses a cascading refresh approach when new infrastructure is purchased, placing the newer equipment in support of the most critical parts of the infrastructure and migrating older equipment to less mission-critical areas. In this case, the archive is the most critical as it houses massive numbers of files that scientists access for their research and because it is regarded as a National Archive, which should be kept indefinitely. The Sandbox infrastructure is the least critical because data is quickly migrated off it into the archive.
Click here for the entire story:
http://wikibon.org/vault/Petabyte_Explosion:_How_Caltech_Manages_to_Manage_Billions_of_Files
This was the message at the September 29th, 2009 Peer Incite Research Meeting, where an industry practitioner, Eugene Hacopians, Senior Systems Engineer at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), addressed the Wikibon community.
Caltech is the academic home of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. As such it runs the downlink for the Spitzer Space Telescope, NASA's orbital space telescope, as well as 13 other missions, processes the raw data into images, and supports the needs of scientists visiting from locations worldwide. The focus of this discussion was the activities of the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC), which has evolved to become the national archive for infrared analysis from telescopic space missions.
To be sure, Caltech's needs are on the edge. The organization is the steward for more than 2.3 petabytes of data created from its 14 currently active missions. Caltech captures data from these missions and performs intense analysis in what it calls its 'Sandbox', a server and storage infrastructure that supports scientific applications that analyze the data. Once 'crunched,' the data is moved to an archive, using homegrown data movement software.
The team at Caltech had to design a cost-effective means of providing reliable data access to all this scientific data. As well, organizationally, the projects supported by Caltech had to be completely walled from each other from an accounting standpoint. Rather than implement a shared SAN infrastructure with onerous chargeback mechanisms, Caltech decided to use a common set of technologies that would support each of the projects. The technological building blocks are:
A Sun Solaris server running the ZFS file system, A QLogic 5602 FC switch, One-to-three Nexsan SATA Beast arrays.
Caltech uses Nexsan's Automaid spindown capabilities in its archive to reduce energy costs, using Level 1 (slowing the spin speed of the disk) and Level 2 (parking the heads after sufficient inactivity). It does not put the drives into sleep mode (Level 3) and has never had reliability problems associated with spinning down devices.
Caltech uses SAIC tape for long term archiving and last resort off-site disaster recovery. However, its own tests indicate that because of the huge number of small files involved, recovery from tape would take weeks or longer.
This building block approach has allowed Caltech to use common configurations across its infrastructure. Caltech derives four main benefits from this strategy:
1.The infrastructure is architected for fast, simple, safe recovery from failure or data loss.
2.The approach scales nicely in support of Caltech's data growth, which occurs in large chunks of hundreds of TB's and billions of tiles at a time.
3.It streamlines staff training.
4.The "Lego" building-block method allows Caltech to reuse infrastructure when it comes off maintenance, providing it with large numbers of spares and saving money.
Caltech uses a cascading refresh approach when new infrastructure is purchased, placing the newer equipment in support of the most critical parts of the infrastructure and migrating older equipment to less mission-critical areas. In this case, the archive is the most critical as it houses massive numbers of files that scientists access for their research and because it is regarded as a National Archive, which should be kept indefinitely. The Sandbox infrastructure is the least critical because data is quickly migrated off it into the archive.
Click here for the entire story:
http://wikibon.org/vault/Petabyte_Explosion:_How_Caltech_Manages_to_Manage_Billions_of_Files
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