BYU Adds BlueArc Storage

BlueArc Corporation, a leader in scalable,
high-performance unified network storage, today announced that Brigham
Young University’s Fulton Supercomputing Lab has implemented a pair of
BlueArc Titan storage systems to address their increasing demand for
fast, reliable access to terabytes of data for diverse university
research projects. These project demands range from modeling aspects of
the influenza A virus to simulating the radiation from neutron star
collisions, modeling languages and simulating particle physics. In
addition to world-record performance, BlueArc’s Titan storage system
offers BYU’s supercomputing facility high reliability for the system’s
massive workload of simultaneous file- and data-intensive processing
tasks.

BYU’s Ira and Mary Lou Fulton Supercomputing Laboratory is
among the 150 largest such facilities in the world. At the heart of the
lab is marylou4, a Linux cluster comprising 630 nodes and 2,500
processor cores available for faculty and students who need more
compute power than their desktops can provide. The supercomputing
facility presently supports more than 200 researchers as well as users
in the university’s award-winning animation department. Operations
Director Tom Raisor chose the BlueArc solution after canvassing other
university supercomputing lab directors, evaluating a wide variety of
network storage vendors and consulting with services provider VarData,
a BlueArc value-added reseller.

"BYU offers computing capacity to
all students and faculty who need it, and BlueArc Titan technology met
our primary criteria of speed and reliability for tasks using massive
files as well as the more difficult challenge of handling millions of
tiny files," said Raisor. "VarData recognized that BlueArc was a good
fit for our needs and went the extra mile to ensure that none of our
questions or concerns went unanswered. The product we received was the
product we expected. Just as important, the ringing endorsement for
BlueArc from other supercomputing facility managers validated our
decision."

Fulton Supercomputing Laboratory specifications for
the storage solution included throughput of 3 gigabytes per second and
at least 60,000 IOPS. BlueArc’s Titan storage systems more than met
those requirements, with significant available headroom for future
demands. The BlueArc solution also allowed Raisor to integrate existing
Hitachi storage technology and make the most of existing infrastructure.

A
lean IT staff comprising two full-time and three part-time employees
supports the Fulton Supercomputing Laboratory. Researchers’
productivity benefits from the lab staff’s ability to work
productively. BlueArc’s support for the Network File System (NFS)
protocol gave Mr. Raisor added assurance that his team would be able to
spend time on innovative solutions to users’ needs, rather than
troubleshooting or fixing compatibility issues that arose frequently
with other offerings that would introduce non-standard clients and
configurations.

Within a few weeks of the BlueArc Titan
deployment, users noticed an improvement in system performance and
reliability, and a subsequent surge in demand has created a two-day
wait for new projects to launch in the lab’s job queue. Therefore, Mr.
Raisor anticipates that BYU will upgrade its core processor count by 50
percent in the next three to four months, and expects the BlueArc
system to scale easily with that growth.

BlueArc Corporation

Brigham
Young University