SCIENCE

HP announced that the University of Utah's Center for High Performance Computing (CHPC) has selected HP storage and servers to reduce the data processing time required for research projects by 50 percent(1) and accelerate information delivery.

The CHPC provides large-scale high-performance systems to faculty and research groups that need advanced computing resources. However, existing systems at the CHPC required days or weeks(2) to complete a project, lacking the performance needed to process and deliver large quantities of information.

Upgrading to HP Converged Infrastructure, the center chose the HP X9320 IBRIX Network Storage System, a scalable, flexible and cost-efficient storage infrastructure, as well as HP ProLiant SL160z G6 servers, optimized for performance per watt and square foot, while maximizing power efficiency with shared power supplies.

"Our research groups use the CHPC resources to quickly collect and analyze information for a variety of research projects at a national level," said Guy Adams, assistant director, Center for High Performance Computing, University of Utah. "When benchmarking potential solutions, we realized that the HP IBRIX-based X9320 would not only improve the efficiency of our operations and research, it offered a 'pay as you grow' approach that allowed us to optimize our initial investments."

HP X9000 IBRIX Network Storage Systems offer the benefits of a modular storage infrastructure with capacity and performance of a scale-out architecture. It accommodates rapid storage growth, which is critical for CHPC environments and performance-intensive applications.

The CHPC also implemented HP ProLiant SL160z G6 servers to boost performance and simplify management with HP Insight Control software, which allows administrators to control the management and monitoring of the server infrastructure onsite or remotely.

As a result, HP solutions enabled the CHPC to:

-- Achieve greater return on investment by transferring large data sets in hours instead of days. The improved balance between capacity and performance is a result of intelligently sorting data using storage tiers. Keeping the more important data on the highest performing storage tiers allows professors to drive critical research even on a limited budget.(3)

-- Reduce processing time of research projects from three days to one-and-a-half days by eliminating input/output bottlenecks. This enables researchers to rapidly access final information after the research process is completed.(1)

-- Simplify management operations from days to minutes with a centralized management interface that controls storage from a single location.(2)

"The University of Utah's CHPC needed a storage infrastructure that would support diverse system users and different types of workloads at once, while providing a highly scalable environment," said Chris Riley, vice president, Americas, Storage, HP. "The flexibility and cost efficiencies of the HP X9320 IBRIX system align with the CHPC's goals of maximizing productivity for clients while decreasing downtime."