Xenon Systems and Versity Software Deploy 150PB Storage System

Versity Software, Inc. announced that the 150PB storage solution for Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre in Perth, Australia, has been fully customized and deployed.

This project is part of a 5-year contract to implement a modernized data management system for Pawsey from the Australian HPC specialist, Xenon Systems Pty Ltd.

This storage system, called Banksia by Pawsey, is driven by Versity’s next gen Scale Out Archive Manager (ScoutAM) platform. The system provides researchers with access to archival data using the S3 protocol and automates complex workflows while enabling responsive metadata searches and queries.

Leveraging Versity’s technologies, the system enables Pawsey to maintain production access to its entire historical data collection, even after its legacy storage system has been decommissioned.

ScoutAM presents a global view of all metadata and access to all data without traditional time-consuming data migration.

“This system enables Pawsey to expand and modernize our essential data services for our astronomy research communities, while seamlessly transitioning to a new modular open-standard platform that can grow as our needs continue to evolve,” said Mark Gray, head of scientific platforms, Pawsey. “This provides an easy offramp from older proprietary systems and creates a foundation for more efficient data management in support of our scientific missions.“

The ScoutAM platform is deployed in a scale-out architecture to enable petabyte scale production workflows between a 3-tier system comprised of existing HPC storage, a 60PB object storage data lake, and the Banksia long-term mass storage infrastructure. In Banksia, ScoutAM manages a 5PB data cache, and 2 large tape libraries. All tape IO is parallelized across 68 tape drives with 74PB in each library, with headroom for more storage over time.

“Versity’s mission is to provide customers like Pawsey with a world-class hardware vendor-neutral data management platform to seamlessly orchestrate extremely resource intensive high speed data movement across any range of storage types at very large scale,” said Bruce Gilpin, CEO and co-founder, Versity.

The planning, design, and overall project management of Banksia has been delivered by Xenon who has supplied all components including racks with rear door heat exchangers, servers, network fabric and switches for FC connections, and physical storage hardware. Xenon Services set-up, pre-staged and thoroughly load tested the system in the Xenon production facility in Melbourne, ensuring that when Banksia was delivered to Pawsey, everything was working and integrated into the center’s environment.

Xenon has also provided documentation and training on Versity, and all aspects of managing the system. During commissioning and initial data in-place data migrations, Xenon Services have managed the day-to-day operation of Banksia. These services continue after the handover of Banksia, with Xenon providing ongoing support to ensure Banksia continues to operate at optimal efficiency for Pawsey.

“Xenon has been integral to the successful delivery of Banksia, with the Xenon team working closely with us and Versity to deliver a great storage system,” said Stacy Tyson, project manager of the technology refresh, Pawsey.

The Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre is a HPC facility accelerating scientific discoveries for Australia’s researchers. Named after Australian scientist Joseph Pawsey, known as one of the pioneers of Australian radio astronomy for his work in the field of interferometry, it serves over 1,600 researchers achieving results in domains such as radio astronomy, energy and resources, engineering, bioinformatics and health sciences.