German GridKa Installed 825 Brocade SAN Switches and HBAs

Brocade Communications Systems, Inc. announced that the Grid Computing Center Karlsruhe (GridKa), the German hub of the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG), has installed Brocade 825 dual-port 8 Gbps host bus adapters (HBAs) and Brocade Data Center Fabric Manager (DCFM) to deliver a secure, high-performance flow of data between its data center and the thousands of scientists and students in the organization’s research center whose mission-critical work requires continuous, reliable access to the data.

Based at the Steinbuch Center for Computing (SCC), GridKa is linked directly to the European CERN nuclear research center in Geneva. The center fulfils a dual role as a data center as well as a scientific institute (which means ‘science and service under one roof’) at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), and is one of the most powerful data centers in Germany.

GridKa’s direct link to CERN and its research initiatives with the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) generate very high traffic volumes across the organization’s data center. As the world’s largest annular particle accelerator, the LHC currently generates approximately 8 Petabytes (PB) of data annually, plus an additional 4 PB of simulation data. GridKa’s infrastructure consists of 130 Linux servers and various hard drive systems with a capacity of 6 PB. Most of the hard drive systems connect directly via Fibre Channel to the servers over patch panels. The storage environment also consists of three tape libraries in two locations connected via two Brocade 4900 switches and a Brocade 48000 Director. An additional Brocade SAN environment within the SCC provides a total of 8,000 employees and 18,000 students with IT services such as e-mail, online storage and databases.

Due to these high data demands, GridKa relies heavily on the performance and reliability of its storage environment. As the German Tier 1 data center of WLCG, GridKa provides 6 PB of online storage, which will be expanded to 30 PB by 2014. The data must be stored for the lifetime of the experiments, and needs to be made accessible to approximately 8,000 scientists globally. This produces two data management challenges: firstly, the infrastructure must guarantee stable storage operation (in part with very high transaction rates) and secondly, the support of a data archive of more than 25 PB for many decades to come.

Because the organization’s outdated HBAs couldn’t meet the requirements of its new IT architecture, GridKa turned to the Brocade 825 dual-port 8 Gbps Fibre Channel HBAs and Brocade Data Center Fabric Manager (DCFM), which centralizes all management and administrative tasks into one console that saves time, resources and costs.

"Until recently, our disk and backup storage systems were connected to the SAN using outdated HBA technology. After checking various options thoroughly, GridKa chose to transition to Brocade HBAs. The online storage system was connected exclusively to the Brocade 825 dual-port 8 Gbps Fibre Channel HBAs, and the Brocade HBAs were integrated seamlessly into our existing Brocade environment. In addition, the Brocade HBAs are working very well with multi-pathing which delivers far better performance," explained Stephanie Böhringer, storage expert at the GridKa Center.

"If the new SAN infrastructure at GridKa continues to impress us as it has done until now, we will also install it in the new Large Scale Data Facility (LSDF), the new SCC project that targets to store massive amounts of scientific data other than LHC data. In order to ensure we are equipped for the future, we need innovative, state-of-the-art solutions and, thanks to Brocade, we have them," added Jos van Wezel, group manager and storage infrastructure designer for GridKa and the LSDF.