NETWORKS

FalconStor Software, the leading developer of proven data protection solutions, announced that the Wroclaw Centre for Networking and Supercomputing (WCNS), one of Poland's leading academic centers for technology excellence, has deployed FalconStor's IPStor software to consolidate 2TB of fragmented, difficult-to-manage data stored on direct-attached storage across its network. The institution's network comprises hundreds of heterogeneous servers running various flavors of Irix, Linux, Solaris, and Unix. FalconStor partnered with Polcom to integrate the IPStor solution at WCNS. It was the vast array of equipment, infrastructure and protocols already in use at WCNS, together with the organization's desire to reuse as much of it as possible, that inspired the centre's IT managers to deploy IPStor, which offers unrivalled heterogeneity. The result is an environment that is both virtualized and service-enabled, on an infrastructure comprising both a storage area network and network attached storage, over both Fibre Channel and iSCSI. One of the major benefits of virtualizing storage from so many servers is the huge reduction in effort required to perform a full backup. With IPStor, the backup process requires much less administrative and processing time, yet is more complete and reliable. Capacity management is also improved, as administrators can easily allocate storage to any application or server anywhere on the network on an as-needed basis. Administrators use the IPStor Java-based management console to perform all operations. Many of the servers on the WCNS network had been primarily used for file serving for supercomputing network services and to run software for supercomputing. File serving is now performed by an ADIC StorNext FileSystem. With the scalability of the overall solution, WCNS will easily be able to manage its current annual data growth rate of 100 percent. To provide the highest levels of data availability in its supercomputing environment, WCNS deployed the IPStor software in a high-availability configuration. Two IPStor appliances coexist in an active-active failover configuration, with SafeCache ensuring minimal disruption in the event one of the appliances fails for any reason. In view of the demanding data access requirements in a networked supercomputing environment, WCNS also chose to implement the IPStor DynaPath(R) agent. The DynaPath Agent is an application server resident utility that maximizes data availability for storage systems by creating parallel active storage paths that transparently reroute application server traffic to a redundant storage path without interruption in the event of a storage network problem. "It is the nature of academic IT infrastructures that they become disparate, heterogeneous and sometimes unwieldy," said Pawel Dziekonski, Storage Team Leader, High Performance Computer Departament, WCNS. "And yet we are running supercomputing research projects in just such an environment. IPStor has enabled us to improve the overall performance of our network, redeploying the majority of our existing investment in hardware, software and networking equipment while reducing the administration required to deliver the storage services we need. This is a double-win for us." "This installation is really a showcase for the hardware and operating system independence that customers can achieve using IPStor software," said Guy Berlo, regional director, central region, FalconStor. "At WCNS, IPStor is now the glue that binds the infrastructure together, making it stronger and more effective than it was previously. And in deploying IPStor, we protected the valuable investment in the infrastructure that the institution had already amassed."