Latest Version of Terascala Intelligent Storage Bridge

Terascala, Inc. announced the availability of the latest version of a data movement solution, the Intelligent Storage Bridge (ISB).

Since its introduction in the fall of 2013, companies have been using the ISB to enhance the throughput and reliability of large data transfers, thereby increasing fast scratch efficiency and overall application workflow performance. The latest version of the ISB includes vendor-agnostic support of Lustre solutions, allowing organizations to bring together a wider range of HPC and enterprise storage solutions.

Because many of HPC infrastructures are not optimized for efficient and daily movement of data, vast amounts of unstructured data are typically stranded, limiting valuable analysis opportunities. The ISB is a solution to solve this ‘stranded data’ challenge by automating the transfer of large data sets between high-performance fast scratch storage and an enterprise storage system.

“Since its availability last year, the ISB is helping customers make better use of their valuable, high performance resources“, said Bryan Cote, director of product management, Terascala. “With this new release, the ISB is poised to become an indispensable part of any HPC infrastructure.”

One of Terascala’s first customers to deploy the ISB after it became available in late 2013 was Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen). An Arizona-based healthcare organization, it is focused on using genomic sequencing research to treat disease and bring the fight against childhood cancer to the forefront of the medical research community.

“We have successfully been using the ISB for more than six months, moving genome data sets to and from the Dell HSS on a regular basis. Our researcher productivity is higher and our genome analysis timeline is reduced as a result of using the ISB. We are excited to get the new release,” commented James Lowey, VP of technology, TGen.

Customers using Lustre storage solutions are now able to leverage the ISB’s data transfer performance. In addition to expanded solution support, it now provides programming interfaces that enable integration and management by third party orchestration solutions or home grown scripts and applications.

Along with enhancements to the active data movement capabilities, the new release includes passive CIFS and NFS gateway capabilities. These features allow users of workstation technologies lacking Lustre support to access and update fast scratch data through native file system technologies.

“These new features allow the ISB to become even more valuable to organizations looking to solve their high performance data movement challenges,” said Terri McClure, senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. “Terascala’s ISB allows organizations to reduce the overall amount of infrastructure required, automate the movement of data to and from scratch storage, and more efficiently use scratch space and CPU cycles.”

Used in HPC environments that support research, the ISB is helping standardize and accelerate the way data is managed and monitored in HPC application workflows. For example, Terascala’s partner, Dell, Inc. is implementing the ISB as part of their storage and analysis solutions for high performance environments.

“Because Dell’s research computing customers need high speed access to data from disparate file systems, the ISB is a great complement to Dell’s High Performance Storage solution,” said Chris Myhill, director of research computing and application solutions, Dell. “The ISB’s functionality is also featured in Dell’s Genomic Data Analysis Platform, a converged HPC infrastructure designed to meet the demanding performance and storage requirements of genomics research.”

A workflow driven, clustered data mover appliance, the ISB features HA and redundancy capabilities. The ISB also supports bi-directional data flow between file systems such as Lustre, NFS, CIFS, or the cloud and is controlled by users or by system administrators. It is a key component of the TeraOS family of products available from Terascala, as well as NetApp, Inc. and Dell.