INDUSTRY

Distributed software manages geographically disparate data sharing. Intivity Corporation announced at DICE Alliance 07 the successful deployment of its file-based transparent data migration solution in a high-performance computing (HPC) environment. Intivity's solution showcased file-based data migration and distribution between the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and the DICE (Data Intensive Computing Environment) computing center. DICE provides a realistic, high-performance computing environment where computer, storage, and network vendors can test new products and solutions for high-end data management issues. Intivity software was installed in a UNIX environment to demonstrate local and remote transparent data migration using large geographically disparate datasets, improved access times to tape archives using tiered storage as a buffer cache, and use of filesystem federation to optimize locality of data reference. "Deployment of our solution in the HPC environment at the DICE and NASA/Goddard facilities shows what high-performance file-based data mobility can bring to the HPC community," said Mark Roberts, president of Intivity. "Intivity's approach enables great flexibility in policy-driven data migration, replication, distribution and retrieval." "DICE is a new approach to solutions for the High Performance Computing community," said Roger Panton, DICE Executive Director. "The ultimate goal is to improve the time-to-solution of complex engineering and scientific problems. It is a discreet environment, where we learn and share in each project's successes." Intivity's policy-based, file-oriented solution makes data movement decisions based on the business context of the data. Policies can be applied down to individual files. Intivity provides an "open tier" solution, where data is stored in non-proprietary file systems and formats which can be accessed without proprietary software. Intivity software can be used for migration and then removed, but the solution can also remain in place to provide policy-driven data archival and retention, replication, and flexible multi-tier HSM configurations. The Intivity software supports filesystems as well as sequential media as storage tiers. The currently-supported tier formats are open, although the underlying Intivity architecture is generalized so that incorporating support for new tier types is straightforward. Intivity's policy-enabled filesystem can also act as a front-end to proprietary storage and archival systems such as content addressable storage (CAS) and de-duplication appliances. Intivity data migration capabilities for HPC environments will be demonstrated in the DICE/AVETeC booth at SC|07.