German Resarch Center Desy Deploys Datadirect’s SFA10000

DataDirect Networks, Inc. (DDN)y announced that DESY (Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron), a research center in Germany, is deploying DDN’s Storage Fusion Architecture (SFA) 10000 system, doubling the existing DDN storage capacity available for the new Physics Analysis Center.

The DDN SFA10000 is the first representation of a revolutionary new architecture from DataDirect Networks, designed to deliver industry-leading levels of capacity and transactional bandwidth to support data intensive computing applications.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) project at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) aims to research the world’s smallest known particles by recreating the conditions existing a few moments after the Big Bang. The Large Hadron Collider, approximately 27 Kilometers in diameter and lying in a tunnel underneath France and Switzerland near Geneva, Switzerland, is one of the world’s most ambitious research initiatives and is expected to come online in late 2009.

Once online, the LHC will produce an explosive amount of data that must be processed, distributed and archived by collaborating institutions all around the world. The LHC partner community supports thousands of researchers at institutions in 33 countries and is expected to generate as much as 15,000,000 gigabytes of unique data annually. Because storage infrastructure is such an increasingly important component to supporting this research, DESY identified a number of key requirements that were critical from the storage infrastructure chosen for such a massive data analysis project.

"Because this data must be kept online for years, long term data integrity is critical to our mission. We started to see a significant number of Silent Data Corruption (SDC) events from systems delivered by other storage companies, regardless of vendor or how expensive the system was – it’s just something most disk vendors don’t seem to be sensitive to," explains Martin Gasthuber, storage architect for the Physics Analysis Center at DESY. "We were also looking for high bandwidth for our high-throughput computing environment, as well as scalable capacity that allows us to easily accommodate dozens of petabytes of data. The SFA10000 is the natural choice for this project as it delivers the right mix of performance and capacity while also ensuring that our data is safe with DDN’s SATAssure Silent Data Corruption avoidance technology."

"We can now easily scale out our Lustre file system environment with DDN storage. The SFA10000 serves as a scalable building block in our infrastructure, combining our existing DDN storage systems into multi-petabyte scalable file storage. We are also excited to see the very low datacenter footprint with up to 600 drives in one rack and the minimal energy and cooling requirements of the system, while reliably managing thousands of SATA drives," continues Gasthuber.

"Multi-petabyte storage environments are becoming more and more common across data intensive research environments all around the world. DDN has designed technology specifically for these research efforts which balance performance with cost-effective capacity and intelligent data protection," said Alex Bouzari, CEO and Co-Founder of DataDirect Networks. "Across the world, the LHC research community is turning to DDN technology to simplify and accelerate their particle physics data infrastructure. We are excited to see our vision validated and for DESY to deploy DDN’s SFA10000."