INTERCONNECTS

Engineers at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) in Greenbelt, MD, and NASA Ames Research Center (ARC) in Mountain View, CA, have collaborated with Obsidian Strategics to provide secure file level data transport with unprecedented efficiency using Longbow E100 devices and a new tool developed for the purpose – DSYNC.

“It is notoriously difficult to move very large data sets over long distances at high speeds using TCP-based networks,” noted Hoot Thompson of the NCCS supercomputer facility at GSFC. “This task becomes even harder if the data is to be encrypted on the wire and resides in a great many files, both very large and very small. NASA would like to make this process routine, to support inter-site backups and more effectively share access to our supercomputers Columbia, Discover and Pleiades.”

Obsidian's Dr. David Southwell said, “We have worked closely with NASA to provide a solution to this growing problem, and are proud to announce the availability of the Longbow E100 as well as a new software tool that together solve this exact data transport problem. The Longbow E100 transparently extends InfiniBand networks over global 10 Gigabit Ethernet connections, while also providing in-line standards-based AES-192-GCM cryptography for authentication and data encryption.”

“The Longbow-optimized DSYNC tool runs on Linux-based servers and operates on directories of files and so is independent of the file system type and underlying storage hardware details,” explains Dr. Southwell. “DSYNC performs a highly efficient scanning and streaming of file changes between the two target directories, and working with the Longbow E100s provides sustained local storage-speed synchronizations over arbitrary distances.”

“Longbow E100 and DSYNC combine into a very easy to use long-haul bulk data transport mechanism that achieves storage-limited speeds and high-grade security, without requiring performance tuning,” said Thompson.

Live demonstrations of secure storage-to-storage transfers between GSFC and the SC09 conference in Portland, OR, can be viewed in NASA’s booth, #1947, Tuesday, November 17 through Thursday, November 19.