Meteo France Implements SGI InfiniteStorage 4600 With 400TB

LSI Corporation announced that Meteo France, the French national weather forecasting agency, has upgraded the performance and efficiency of its supercomputers by implementing an SGI InfiniteStorage 4600 storage solution based on the LSI Engenio 7900 HPC storage system.

Meteo France collects and stores extraordinarily large volumes of meteorological data about Earth’s oceans, atmosphere and snow cover, which are then processed by a range of supercomputing applications including weather, marine and pollution forecasting. Meteo France needed a new storage solution that could handle both existing data volumes and support data growth of 15 percent per year. The storage solution also had to enable daily data transfers of more than 16 terabytes between disk and tape and allow users to quickly browse through nearly ten million small files.

"The faster the supercomputer is able to write results, the more time and money we save," said Alain Beuraud, head of HPC and Storage Department at Meteo France. "We needed reliable, high performance storage that could handle the enormous data volumes while also providing us with the flexibility to store less active or older data on cheaper media."

The SGI InfiniteStorage 4600 solution, based on the LSI Engenio 7900 HPC system technology, currently contains more than 400 terabytes of data and enables data transfer rates of up to 4 GB/s. To meet Meteo France’s annual data growth rates, the system offers initial capacity of up to one petabyte through a combination of Fibre Channel and high-capacity SATA drive enclosures.

The system’s high-density LSI Engenio DE6900 SATA drive enclosure can house 60 3.5-inch SATA drives in a 4U space. The enclosure allows Meteo France to more efficiently utilize its limited IT space, enabling a 480TB system to reside within a standard 19-inch rack. The high density offered by the DE6900 enclosure can reduce power consumption by more than 30 percent and floor space by more than 65 percent.

"LSI Engenio storage systems are trusted by leading OEMs and end users to deliver the performance and reliability required by the world’s most demanding applications," said Steve Hochberg, senior director, worldwide HPC segment, LSI. "The combination of the low-cost, high-density SATA drive enclosure with the 7900 HPC storage system provides Meteo France with exceptional price-performance, high scalability and significant cost savings through reduced power consumption and floor space."

The Engenio 7900 HPC storage system is architected for complex and high-bandwidth application environments that store and utilize vast amounts of data. The system combines industry-leading performance with advanced availability and reliability features designed to provide continuous high-speed data accessibility and protection across a wide range of HPC environments. Together, the 7900 HPC system and DE6900 enclosures enable users to implement a tiered storage solution by using both high-performance Fibre Channel drives and low-cost, high-capacity SATA drives.

The LSI Engenio 7900 HPC storage system with the DE6900 drive enclosure is available today through select OEM partners, including SGI.