Czech National Research Cesnet Selects SGI

Silicon Graphics International Corporation (SGI) announced that Cesnet, the association of Czech Universities and the Czech Academy of Sciences, has selected an SGI InfiniteStorage (IS) Data Migration Facility (DMF) storage tier virtualization solution to support the centralized data storage and archiving requirements of Czech research and education institutions.

DMF will provide the HSM system that enables transparent access to all data, eliminates single-point of failure and secures the ability to add storage as system requirements grow. This can be done without end user interruptions or operational intervention, and it reduces storage and storage management costs with reduced risk and improved service levels.

Cesnet is an association of legal entities, made up of the public universities of the Czech Republic and the Czech Academy of Sciences. Its main goals are operation and development of the Czech NREN (National Research and Education Network), research and development of advanced network technologies and applications and broadening of the public knowledge about advanced networking topics. In parallel with the strengthening and modernization of existing network infrastructure it is planned to build major storage capacity within a nationwide grid storage – in Pilsen, Pardubice and Brno. The project is financed from EU Structure funds under VaVpI operational programme managed by Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of Czech Republic. The first storage system, delivered by SGI and located in Pilsen, was configured and has already been put into test production phase.

The purpose of the planned national storage infrastructure is to provision advanced storage services (including long-term archiving), and enable data sharing with enhanced management and lifecycle management generated on a range of subjects. The proposed concept will optimize the costs for storage, security, recovery, and data management.

“The speed and scale at which our storage requirements have been growing required that we find an advanced solution that could evolve at the same pace,” said Dr. Peter Vercimak, head of storage department at Cesnet. “Rather than try to assemble this critical storage system from modular collection of various parts, SGI was able to provide the hardware, software, and management expertise that allowed us to tailor a solution that will serve us effectively and efficiently as our association’s members’ and other research and development clients’ storage and archiving needs continue to grow.“

To fulfill defined goals Cesnet decided to use SGI expertise and selected a complete solution which consists of SGI hardware, software, and a full set of services. Initial usable capacity without compression is 3.8PB and close to double with compression on the tape tier. Capacity will be delivered to users via file based (NFS, CIFS, FTP) or block based (FC, iSCSI) sharing.

“SGI DMF can dramatically reduce storage costs by creating and automatically managing a virtual storage pool consisting of multiple cost-differentiated tiers of disk and tape,” said Rod Evans, VP of SGI EMEA. “Based on user criteria, DMF continuously monitors and automatically migrates data among storage assets, making it the optimal storage solution for a wide range of applications. We’re pleased to be working with Cesnet to deliver this efficient and effective storage management solution.“

In addition to DMF tiered storage virtualization, other key components of the solution include a pair of SGI InfiniteStorage 4600 RAID disk arrays with a combination of 8Gb FC and 10Gb iSCSI host ports, FC RAID-5 (tier1-50TiB) and SATA RAID-6 (tier2-400TiB) drives, a group of front-end, control and infrastructure servers based on SGI Rackable C3108-TY11 standard-depth rack-mount servers, an enterprise Spectra Logic T-finity tape library using LTO-5 technology with installed 11 LTO-5 drives, close to 3700 tape slots and initially loaded with 2200 LTO-5 tapes, SAN 8Gb, 10GbE an 1GbE redundant network infrastructure, SGI CXFS clustered parallel file system and SGI Management Centre software.

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