ACADEMIA

DataDirect Networks announced it has been selected by the IT Center for Science (CSC), a non-profit company providing IT support and resources for academia administered by the Finnish Ministry of Education, Science and Culture, to design and build a massive, tiered storage system to scale with, and accelerate, CSC's customers' data-driven research and the preservation of cultural heritage.

"DDN's award-winning technology is equaled only by the insight and experience of our staff, who for 14 years have helped push the boundaries of computational science. Our company was at the vanguard of the Big Data revolution long before the term 'Big Data' was even coined," said John Josephakis, Senior Vice President of Sales, High Performance Computing and Life Sciences, DDN. "We are honored to have been selected by CSC to provide an integrated storage solution as their Big Data agenda evolves the organization from high-performance computing to data-intensive computing."

This four-year, multi-million Euro agreement includes a fully-integrated storage environment combining DDN's massively scalable SFA 10K storage technology, a multi-petabyte tape library and automated data migration software to simplify access to large scientific and cultural data sets across tiers of cost-optimized storage resources. In building out its storage system, CSC sought a partner with experience meeting the challenges of sustainable scalability, including the environmental impact of the information production chain and systems energy consumption.

"DDN's solution gives CSC the flexibility to best support and scale our user services," said Kimmo Koski, Managing Director and Chair of CSC. "Their expertise in enabling organizations to manage the complexities of the Big Data is a critical asset to our organization."

CSC provides Finland's most powerful supercomputing resources, including Louhi -- CSC's 1,344 processor system from Cray, and has been named by Top500.org as one of the world's 500 fastest supercomputer sites every year since Top500.org was established in 1993. Introduced in 1971, CSC provides expertise and resources in the service of research, education and culture in Finland and beyond. In 2010, CSC made a long-term commitment to social responsibility that included environmental best practices for all its facilities.