APPLICATIONS

Redmond, WA., Advanced Digital Information Corporation, the leader in Intelligent Storage™ solutions for the open systems market, today announced that global supercomputer leader Cray Inc. will deliver ADIC’s StorNext® File System as the primary SAN file system in its new Cray X1™ supercomputer. The file system, which is being made available through a long-term source license agreement, will be configured for Cray’s UNICOS™ operating system and will be delivered with every Cray X1 system. "We selected ADIC because of its high performance, highly scalable, robust file system technology," said Dave Kiefer, Cray’s Vice President of Product Engineering and Manufacturing. "Providing access to and managing extremely large data sets was one of our critical needs. ADIC technology allows us to offer customers a comprehensive suite of hardware platforms and policy-based software solutions for automated data management and protection." The StorNext File System (StorNext FS) is the core file system technology in ADIC’s StorNext Management Suite (SNMS), a scalable, high performance, data management solution that ensures the long-term safety and recoverability of data in SAN environments, while optimizing the use of storage resources. StorNext FS provides high-performance, shared access to centralized disk storage for heterogeneous clients. Because it gives multiple clients simultaneous access to the same files sets, StorNext FS eliminates the need to move large files over the LAN and to store duplicate file copies. The result is increased storage efficiency, improved productivity, and reduced network bottlenecks. "Cray is the world leader in high-performance computing. The new Cray X1 system will not only set new industry standards for computing speed, but also for storage management," said Bill Yaman, ADIC Software Vice President and Business Line Manager. "We are pleased that Cray has selected ADIC software as the basis for its storage infrastructure and believe that ADIC customers in other open systems environments will benefit from the kind of performance, scalability and resiliency that we demonstrate by supporting Cray’s intensive computing environment." The ADIC/Cray alliance will also make the entire SNMS available through Cray’s sales organization, which will provide direct support for Sun Solaris, SGI IRIX, Windows, and Linux-based platforms. SNMS provides automated policy-based placement of data on different media types to provide Total Data Life Management. With SNMS, data— throughout its lifetime—is always accessible and protected based on levels of service defined by users. In addition, the alliance will make the ADIC family of storage networking tape libraries available through Cray. "The alliance between ADIC and Cray is the first example of high-end SAN storage with robust shareable file systems on a supercomputer platform. If it’s good enough for Cray, imagine the opportunity in the commercial sector," said Steve Duplessie, Senior Analyst, Enterprise Storage Group. "The agreement also promises to make it easier for other compute platforms to share data within the Cray environment and to automatically manage data within that system."