What's Packed in Variola's Suitcase?

[Tyler Durden]

Interesting. Gives a lower limit to certain storage questions. Guess it's no 
suprise IBM's SAN product handled things here, it's been field-tested after 
all.

-TD


GENEVA -- IBM and CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, 
today announced that IBM's storage virtualization software has achieved 
breakthrough performance results in an internal data challenge at CERN.

The data challenge was part of a test currently going on at CERN to simulate 
the computing needs of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) Computing Grid, the 
largest scientific computing grid in the world. The LHC is expected to 
produce massive amounts of data, 15 million gigabytes per year, once it is 
operational in 2007. The recent results represent a major milestone for 
CERN, who is testing cutting-edge data management solutions in the context 
of the CERN openlab, an industrial partnership.

Using IBM TotalStorage SAN File System storage virtualization software, the 
internal tests shattered performance records during a data challenge test by 
CERN by reading and writing data to disk at rates in excess of 1GB/second 
for a total I/O of over 1 petabyte (1 million gigabytes) in a 13-day period. 
This result shows that IBM's pioneering virtualization solution has the 
ability to manage the anticipated needs of what will be the most 
data-intensive experiment in the world. First tests of the integration of 
SAN File System with CERN's storage management system for the LHC 
experiments have already obtained excellent results.

"CERN has a long-standing collaborative relationship with IBM, and we are 
delighted that IBM is pushing the frontiers of data management in the 
context of CERN openlab," said Wolfgang von R|den, Information Technology 
Department Leader at CERN and Head of the CERN openlab. "What we learned 
from these data challenges will surely influence our technological choices 
in the coming years, as we continue to deploy the global LHC Computing 
Grid."