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Intransa Provides IP Storage Infrastructure For HPC Demo

Intransa was chosen to provide its IP-based modular storage area network (SAN) solution to a first-ever demonstration at Supercomputing 2004, showcasing multiple servers accessing the same data in parallel -- via a clustered file system -- spread out across a traditional Fibre Channel SAN and an IP-based SAN in the same infrastructure.

The demonstration is known as Blockbuster, engineered by volunteers from Sandia and Lawrence Livermore National Labs, the nation's premier defense research facility, and enabled by IBM's Global Parallel File System on Linux. Blockbuster is a scalable animation display designed to render a large scientific data -- set on large computer displays. It shows the benefits of high-performance computing in a clustered server environment using high-speed Gb-Ethernet and 10-Gb-Ethernet interconnects and both a traditional Fibre Channel SAN and a modular IP-based SAN from Intransa to provide concurrent user access to the storage infrastructure. Blockbuster calls for 16 clustered servers to access data in a high-performance cluster file system spread out across a petabyte of storage on StorCloud, the shared storage infrastructure created and allocated specifically for use at the Supercomputing 2004 event. The burden placed on the storage in this high- performance computing application is shared among disk in a traditional Fibre Channel SAN and the next-generation IP SAN from Intransa.

"The Intransa storage solution is not only indicative of the power of IP but of what is to come in high-performance computing," said Steve Duplessie, founder and senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. "What's the point in a massively scaleable front-end without a matching back-end? This is the only sensible way to build out a grid architecture, where everything is connected to everything, and each element scales to all new levels."

In addition to the application demonstrations such as Blockbuster, StorCloud also showcases:

• One petabyte of randomly accessible storage available to participants in the Supercomputing 2004 event.
• One terabyte-per-second infrastructure bandwidth.
• One gigabyte-per-second backup bandwidth.
• A management and allocation facility for Supercomputing 2004 participants.

"Thanks to the effort of many industry, academic and government volunteers, as well as researchers at Sandia Labs, Intransa is clearly seen as a leader among peers in this demonstration of tremendous storage interoperability and high- performance computing at the Supercomputing 2004 event," said Ravi Pendekanti, vice president of global marketing and services for Intransa. "This demonstration of StorCloud allows users to witness the ease of integration in a heterogeneous environment, draw comparisons, and see how well Intransa's offerings perform side-by-side with traditional Fibre Channel SAN implementations."