Tiered Adaptive Storage from Cray Powers Petabytes for Research

With the ability to scale up to over 75 petabytes of storage the Cray Tiered Adaptive Storage (TAS) solution has been selected by the North German Supercomputing Alliance (HLRN), under a recently announced contract. Cray TAS is an open storage and archiving solution for big data and high performance computing environments, and gives HLRN a long-term data management solution for its High Performance Computing Center (RRZN) located at Leibniz University in Hannover, Germany.

"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 at 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."

The Cray TAS solution will provide RRZN's users with a large-scale archiving system to actively access, manage and preserve important data resulting from the Center's scientific research. It consists of over one petabyte of data storage and is upgradeable to more than 75 petabytes within the delivered architecture. For RRZN, Cray TAS provided a fast path to move from its existing Oracle SAM-QFS installation to Cray TAS without a lengthy data migration period. It features the Versity Storage Manager, includes all software and hardware, and eliminates complexities associated with planning, designing, and building large-scale archives. 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, solid state drive, 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 vice president 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-class 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."