NOAA Picks SGI

Silicon Graphics
International Corp. (SGI) announced that CSC, North American Public Sector (NPS) National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration (NOAA) account team has selected SGI DMF storage tier
virtualization solution storage solutions to support the data archiving
requirements of NOAA at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL)

SGI InfiniteStorage DMF will provide the hierarchical storage management system
required to handle the organization’s large-scale and active archives, and will
allow transparent access to end users for climate research.

NOAA is the federal agency focused on examining the condition of Earth’s oceans
and the atmosphere, while GFDL develops and uses mathematical models and
computer simulations to improve the understanding and prediction of behaviors
within the atmosphere, oceans and climate. Under the United States Department
of Commerce (DOC), NOAA and GFDL work to expert assessments of changes
in national and global climate through research, computer models and products.

GFDL moves up to 100TB of data per day
into and out of the DMF-managed archive, which makes it one of the most active
data repositories in the world. At 30PB, it
is also the world’s largest data repository under DMF control. GFDL expects its
data store to grow to 90 petabytes in the next three years. SGI’s parallel DMF
will be able to keep pace with these projected increases in both data quantity
and data movement.

"We selected SGI for this
major storage solution deployment based on the company’s proven history of high
performance, and the transparent access parallel DMF will provide to GFDL
researchers," said Steve Baxter, program manager, CSC NPS. "SGI’s past support speaks volumes about how
it will perform in the future as our storage technology partner for GFDL."

SGI DMF creates and manages a tiered virtual
storage environment to reduce equipment and operating costs, improve service
levels and reduce risk. Based on user criteria, DMF continuously monitors and migrates data among storage assets with different cost and performance
characteristics. Only the most critical or timely data resides on higher
performance storage media, while less critical data is
migrated to background storage media. Data always appears to be online and
available to applications and end users, regardless of its actual storage
location.

"GFDL’s installation with SGI is an
extension of its current, long-standing DMF deployment in conjunction with
leading systems integrator CSC," said Jose Reinoso, VP of
storage engineering at SGI. "Parallel
DMF is able to support the largest and most active archives in the world, such
as those at GFDL. The new capabilities of parallel DMF make it a suitable
storage solution to meet their demanding research, storage, and support
requirements."

Parallel DMF delivers the security, cost and transparent access advantages of
tape storage with virtually unparalleled scalability through parallel data
movers and servers powered by Intel Xeon 5670 series processors.