GOVERNMENT

Finisar Corp., a leading provider of network performance tools and fiber optic subsystems, announced that the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), a cutting-edge national high-performance computing center, has selected Finisar's NetWisdom storage area network (SAN) analysis tool to help monitor and troubleshoot its one Petabyte (1,000 Terabytes) SAN, which is projected to grow 10-fold in the next seven years. NCSA's massive SAN fabric supports four diverse supercomputing environments, including the TeraGrid project, a multi-year effort to build and deploy the world's largest, most comprehensive distributed infrastructure for open scientific research. NCSA's impressive supercomputer hardware environment includes a 2,560-processor, 15 teraflop (trillion mathematical operations per second) Xeon-based Dell cluster, a 1,776 processor, 10 TeraFlop Itanium-based IBM cluster, a 1,024 processor, six teraflop SGI Altix system and a 384 processor, two teraflop IBM pSeries 690 server. Brocade switches and IBM TotalStorage Fibre Array Storage Technology (FAStT) equipment make up other components of the SAN infrastructure. NCSA is using Finisar's NetWisdom SAN traffic monitoring system to collect data and analyze trends and to provide end-to-end monitoring of all devices in the SAN fabric. NetWisdom enables NCSA to view critical data about its SAN performance and provides a single correlated view of overall network traffic, helping minimize network downtime through early detection of hidden errors at great levels of detail. "In an ultra high performance, multi vendor SAN environment such as ours, it is extremely difficult to isolate the source of problems in real-time," said Chad Kerner, Systems Engineer with NCSA. "NetWisdom enables us to monitor all the components in the entire SAN fabric in real-time, regardless of manufacturer. We are able to trace problems and provide proof that an issue exists -- as well as whose problem it is -- enabling us to identify problems in our SAN much quicker as well as helping us greatly reduce the time to problem resolution." "We are pleased to welcome NCSA to the Finisar customer family," said Kevin Cornell, Sr. Vice President, General Manager Network Tools Division, Finisar. "Finisar's NetWisdom provides a quality solution for cost-effectively ensuring SAN performance and uptime. We are delighted that NCSA has selected NetWisdom to help monitor and troubleshoot its leading edge storage area network, one of the world's largest."