North German Supercomputing Alliance Customer of Cray

Cray Inc. announced a contract to deliver a Cray Tiered Adaptive Storage (TAS) solution to the North German Supercomputing Alliance (HLRN).

TAS is an open storage and archiving solution for big data and HPC environments, and gives HLRN a long-term data management solution for its HPC Center (RRZN) located at Leibniz University in Hannover, Germany.

The TAS solution will provide RRZN’s users with a large-scale archiving system to access, manage and preserve important data resulting from the Center’s scientific research in the fields of environmental research, climate and ocean modeling, physics, chemistry, bioinformatics, engineering, and fluid dynamics.

This TAS installation consists of more than 1PB of storage and is upgradeable to more than 75PB within the delivered architecture. For RRZN, it provided a path to move from its existing Oracle SAM-QFS installation to Cray TAS without a lengthy data migration period.

“It is important that our supercomputing infrastructure includes a flexible, scalable and simple storage archiving solution that supports the massive demand for supercomputing resources from across the northern states of Germany,” said PD Dr. Steffen Schulze-Kremer, head of HPC department, RRZN. “Cray’s Tiered Adaptive Storage solution seamlessly integrates with our existing supercomputing systems, and is expected to fulfill our storage needs now and into the future.“

TAS features the Versity Storage Manager, includes software and hardware, and eliminates complexities associated with planning, designing, and building large-scale archives. TAS provides for data protection and accessibility at scale, and can be provisioned as a primary file storage system with tiers, as well as a persistent storage archive. It provides transparent data migration across storage tiers – from fast scratch to primary and archive storage, and features up to four flexible storage tiers mixing media, SSD, disk or tape.

“The supercomputing facilities at RRZN support a wide array of complex scientific research, and we are pleased to provide the Center with an end-to-end data management solution that can meet and grow with the big data needs of their scientists and researchers,” said Barry Bolding, Cray’s VP of storage and data management. “Cray TAS allows for a seamless upgrade from RRZN’s existing archiving solution, including the ability to continue to use their current policy engines. With the explosion of big data, we believe that Cray TAS fills a gap in the marketplace for customers who need enterprise data management solutions with high performance and low total-cost-of-ownership. Cray is providing a compelling solution for customers like RRZN that need active access to big data for their scientific workflow and a strong roadmap for their future data-tiering needs.“

The TAS solution is the latest addition to Cray’s portfolio of storage and data management offerings. Cray also offers a storage appliance solution using Cray Sonexion – a scale out Lustre storage system that reduces deployment time and simplifies storage management for performance data. Sonexion addresses a range of customers as it provides performance scalability from gigabytes to terabytes per-second in a single file system and performs optimally at scale.

Cray Cluster Connect is a Lustre storage solution for x86 Linux clusters. It t is a compute agnostic storage and data management offering that allows customers to utilize their Linux compute environment of choice – providing customers with a Lustre solution consisting of hardware, networking, software, architecture and support. Cray is also an original founder and board member of OpenSFS – a consortium focused on advancing Lustre capabilities and keeping Lustre open – and is following the OpenSFS roadmap for Lustre.