APPLICATIONS

Brocade Communications Systems, Inc., the world's leading provider of infrastructure for Storage Area Networks (SANs), today announced that its most powerful SAN director switches were utilized by the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) for a successful world-record demonstration of networked storage speed and performance at SC2004 (SuperComputing 2004) conference last week. SDSC used two Brocade SilkWorm 24000 directors to demonstrate record-setting parallel file system transfer rates as part of the StorCloud Challenge, a petabyte-scale, high-performance storage demonstration that took place on the SC2004 exhibit floor from November 8-11. On Thursday, November 11, StorCloud judges announced that SDSC achieved a 15 gigabytes per second (GB/sec) transfer rate across the 120 Fibre Channel connections between the SDSC booth and the StorCloud SAN infrastructure. SDSC was named the winner in the "Maximum Use of Bandwidth I/O Per Second" category for its world record in generating the fastest data transfer rates in a specified period of time. "We chose SAN directors from Brocade because of our long-term success in working with the company," said Bryan Banister, Manager of SAN and Server Infrastructure at SDSC. "When we created the TeraGrid three years ago, to link SDSC with other supercomputing centers, we used Brocade directors to provide the performance, scalability, and reliability we needed. So it was natural that we would work with Brocade in our effort to create an ad hoc high-speed storage network to demonstrate best-of-breed technology for handling massive amounts of storage on the show floor." The StorCloud Challenge is a competition designed to demonstrate interesting comparisons of storage-intensive applications that demand fast transfer rates and/or use multiple file systems. SDSC was one of a variety of government, industry, and academic volunteers at SC2004 that architected and deployed StorCloud, as an onsite "storage-on-request" system to support researchers demonstrating high-bandwidth applications. At SC2004, SDSC demonstrated a 150-terabyte parallel file system running on 40 IA-64 compute nodes and driving a "fully loaded" IBM TotalStorage SAN solution with 60 IBM FastT 600s. The speed of sorting has long been used as a measure of computer systems I/O and communication performance. SDSC partnered with IBM to sort 120 GB in less than one minute, setting a new record for minute sort.* The same application sorted one terabyte in 487 seconds, breaking the old record for the terabyte sort. SDSC also used this application to saturate the available storage network bandwidth during the StorCloud challenge at rates sustaining 15 Gigabytes per second. The Brocade SilkWorm 24000 is a 128-port director designed to meet the most rigorous high-availability, performance, and scalability requirements. It delivers an extensible architecture that is the foundation for an unprecedented range of system expansion and growth choices for data center investment protection. In addition, it lowers ongoing operational costs by providing the lowest power consumption and most efficient heat dissipation for any director in the industry.