STORAGE

European Organization For Nuclear Research Uses Quantum's StorNext Software to Accelerate Research and Discovery Processes in Recounting the Birth of Matter: Quantum Corp. has announced that its customer, European-based nuclear research organization CERN, was awarded Computerworld's prestigious "Best Practices in Storage" Award for Systems Implementation. The award honors CERN for its innovative use of Quantum's StorNext software that enables the laboratory to accelerate its research and discovery processes as it delves further into the fundamental structures of the universe. Winners were announced during the recent Computerworld Storage Networking World conference. Honorees were selected from more than 100 qualified entries across five categories and judged on their innovative use of storage technology and its ability to strategically impact their business. "We extend our congratulations to the CERN team for winning this prestigious storage industry award," said Lance Hukill, vice president of software sales for Quantum. "We are honored to be a part of the important work that CERN is conducting and pleased that StorNext could provide the high speed, heterogeneous requirements needed to improve their workflow operations." Headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, CERN is the world's leading laboratory for particle physics. Recently, the organization built the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a particle accelerator, to help scientists recreate conditions just a few million millionths of a second after the "Big Bang." Using the LHC, a collaboration of more than 1,000 physicists, engineers and technicians from 30 countries are working on one of the largest experiments in the world -- A Large Ion Collider Experiment, also known as ALICE. ALICE will contribute to resolving one of the oldest challenges in fundamental physics: recounting the birth of matter. ALICE will create massive amounts of data to be collected via detectors. As a result, CERN has been developing a cutting-edge information management system to help capture, record and analyze the data. "CERN's experiments generate massive amounts of data required for analysis, which is the most precious commodity we have," said Pierre Vande Vyvre, project leader for CERN. "Quantum's StorNext software is instrumental in collecting that data quickly and reliably, thereby enabling the scientific community to understand and exploit new ideas and discoveries. StorNext has demonstrated excellence in design and execution as well as met our demanding requirements on time and on budget." To accommodate the expected one petabyte of data that will be accumulated during the first month of the experiments, the system requires 1 Gb/s of sustained performance -- both day and night. Another challenge is location: all of the data resides on mass storage systems in CERN's main computer center, while ALICE is being conducted a few miles away. During the experiment, scientists must be able to access data quickly and easily on all hosts without having to pass the data over slow network connections. To solve this challenge, CERN realized it needed a clustered file system (CFS) with four main features: -- maximum aggregate bandwidth performance, -- a minimal hardware footprint, -- the ability to manage up to 100 user nodes, -- and, perhaps most importantly, independence between the CFS and the underlying hardware. After carefully evaluating three different products and putting each through weeks of vigorous testing, only Quantum's StorNext software was able to deliver on all the requirements. In fact, StorNext delivered significantly higher performance than its competitors, mostly due to leveraging the 4 Gb/s Fibre Channel connection of the storage equipment used. The StorNext deployment spans across 20 disk arrays and 60 clients connected to 16 port switches. This allows StorNext to highlight one of its strongest assets: affinity. Affinities are features that guide data to a particular type of disk within the data store. The ALICE team is able to direct the data to specific primary disks by writing to the affinities' associated relation points. Affinity also ensures that all machines are able to operate at maximum performance at all times -- a critical issue for CERN. Today, Quantum's StorNext is delivering the high-speed, shared workflow operations and large-scale, multi-tier archiving required by ALICE. All files are accessible to host applications through a single namespace enabling transparent access -- no matter where the files are located. For more information please visit: its Web site.