Zettar Transferred 1PB in 34 Hours With AIC Servers

AIC, Inc. announces the completion of a landmark, one petabyte transfer of data in 34 hours, during a recent test by Zettar, Inc. that relied on the company’s SB122A-PH, 1U 10-bay NVMe storage server.

AIC SB122A-PH

As organizations find themselves creating, storing and working with ever-increasingly larger files and sets of data, it becomes imperative to come up with new solutions to speed up the transfer of information. Exascale computing will be essential for maintaining the nation’s prestige, advancing sciences, and improving the economic well-being of the society.

Any company that has HPC requirements stands to benefit from the equipment used in the recent one petabyte transfer test. Whether working with a content delivery network, big data, data centers, cloud service providers, or as a backup solution provider, user need a new solution for faster data throughput in order to remain competitive.

A range of industries will need to take advantage of exascale computing, oil and gas, media and entertainment, life sciences, defense and intelligence agencies. Newly emerging fields such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, digital transformation, and intelligent enterprises are no exceptions.

SB122A front and rear

Four of company’s SB122A-PH 10-bay NVMe 1U storage servers were used in the test, along with 16 DC P3700 U.2 1.6TB NVMe SSDs from Intel Corp.’s non-volatile memory solutions group (NSG).

The SB122A-PH is a commodity server that is symmetrical in architecture design, enabling it to deliver better performance than other servers on the market.

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The test sent data on a 5,000-mile loop that goes from the US Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science (SC)’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory (SLAC) in Menlo Park, CA, Sunnyvale, CA, El Paso, TX, Houston, TX, Nashville, TN, Atlanta, GA, and back to SLAC/Menlo Park. This is the world’s only 5,000-mile 100Gb/s loop available and has been established by the Energy Science Network (ESNet) for the SLAC (Zettar’s efforts since 2015). ESNet is operated by the DOE’s SC. It runs a 100Gb/s national backbone, which connects DOE SC laboratories together and to the other parts of the Internet.

Transparency is critical when it comes to evaluating high-speed data transfer milestones like the recent 1PB effort. The test performed by Zettar is likely the only one in the world whose results were publicly viewable (and can be seen on the ESNet’s Network portal).

“Zettar is more than capable of handling multiple PBs of high speed data transfers weekly and is a founding member of the exclusive and elite ‘Exascale-ready Club,’” said Dr. Chin Fang, founder and CEO, Zettar. “To be admitted in the first half of 2017, an organization or team must be capable of using a shared, production, point-to-point WAN link to attain a production data transfer rate that is equal or greater than 270PB-km/hour.“

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