ENTERTAINMENT

BlueArc(tm) Corporation, a leader in high performance, highly scalable network attached storage (NAS), announced today that its SiliconServer Architecture has been adopted by a growing number of university Supercomputing labs, including Penn State and Rice University. BlueArc is addressing this rapidly expanding market through the establishment of an Education Practice tailored specifically to meet the needs of high performance computing (HPC) environments. The Graduate Education and Research Services (GEaRS) group is a unit of Information Technology Services (ITS) at Penn State, one of the country's largest research universities. The GEaRS group strives to meet the research computing needs of about 250 researchers in a variety of academic departments and disciplines across the University. Penn State, one of the forerunners in HPC at university-based centers, is constantly exploring new advancements in scientific computing technology. For Penn State, the most important factors in evaluating file servers were scalability, cost and deployment of BlueArc's SiliconServers by organizations with similar HPC requirements. "BlueArc's SiliconServer Architecture allows us to deploy a much larger cluster without running into the issue of deploying multiple network file servers," said Vijay Agarwala, director of GEaRS at Penn State. "As a result, we've gained a lot of scalability in building our computational resources. BlueArc's SiliconServer Architecture has proven to be extremely reliable. We are not only willing to speak with other groups on this campus about the value we have received from BlueArc's Education Practice, but more importantly, to other universities across the country." Consistently ranked one of America's best teaching and research institutions, Rice University was searching for an HPC solution to capture, translate and render more than 12GB per hour of data into streaming media. Previously, the University's Educational Technology and Networking Infrastructure (ET&NI) department, which is responsible for producing Webcasts of campus events and instructional videos, captured data on one computer system and then copied this data to other machines for editing. The efficiency and speed of BlueArc's SiliconServer Architecture has allowed Rice University to share video data between several systems at the same time. "As a result of the large amounts of data that we capture on an hourly basis, our current storage solution was unable to keep up with our demanding needs," said Hubert Daugherty, Media Systems Manager for Rice University. "We needed a solution that could perform in a true HPC environment and would integrate easily into our existing infrastructure. In addition to offering the highest performance in a shared data application on the market, BlueArc's solution plugged in easily to our existing network and we were up and running right away." "As educational institutions continue to create unprecedented volumes of data, protecting and managing this information is absolutely essential," said Jeff Allen, senior vice president of Marketing at BlueArc. "BlueArc's SiliconServer Architecture continues to provide the unmatched protection that the education market has come to expect, by delivering the reliability and performance needed to meet today's demanding HPC requirements." BlueArc's SiliconServer Family of products provides a wire-speed network attached fixed storage solution to meet the challenges of sharing, managing, and protecting data within any enterprise. With a wide range of industry-standard networking features, the SiliconServer easily integrates into any open storage network while delivering maximum performance and scalability. This architecture is particularly well suited for the highly intensive data storage requirements of research labs within universities.