SDSC launches largest cloud storage system

NEW YORK, USA: The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California, San Diego, announced the launch of what is believed to be the largest academic-based cloud storage system in the US.

The centre is specifically designed for researchers, students, academics, and industry users who require stable, secure, and cost-effective storage and sharing of digital information, including extremely large data sets, says a release.

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"We believe that the SDSC Cloud may well revolutionize how data is preserved and shared among researchers, especially massive datasets that are becoming more prevalent in this new era of data-intensive research and computing," said Michael Norman, director, SDSC. "The SDSC Cloud goes a long way toward meeting federal data sharing requirements, since every data object has a unique URL and could be accessed over the web."

SDSC's new web-based system is 100 per cent disk-based and interconnected by high-speed 10 gigabit Ethernet switching technology. 

With an initial raw capacity of 5.5 petabytes — one petabyte equals one quadrillion bytes of storage capacity, or the equivalent about 250 billion pages of text — the SDSC Cloud has sustained read rates of 8 to 10 gigabytes (GB) per second that will continually improve as more nodes and storage are added, adds the release.

Moreover, the SDSC Cloud is scalable by orders of magnitude to hundreds of petabytes, with aggregate performance and capacity both scaling almost linearly with growth, claims SDSC in the release.

"The SDSC Cloud marks a paradigm shift in how we think about long-term storage," said Richard Moore, SDSC's deputy director. "We are shifting from the 'write once and read never' model of archival data, to one that says 'if you think your data is important, then it should be readily accessible and shared with the broader community.'"

"UC San Diego is one of the most data-centric universities in the country, so our goal was to develop a centralized, scalable data storage system designed to meet performance, functionality, and capacity needs of our researchers and partners across the country, and to evolve and scale with the needs of the scientific community," said Dallas Thornton, SDSC's division director of cyberinfrastructure services.

Durability and Security

The SDSC Cloud leverages the infrastructure designed for parallel file system by using two Arista Networks 7508 switches, providing 768 total 10 gigabit (Gb) Ethernet ports for more than 10Tbit/s of non-blocking, IP-based connectivity.

By early 2012, Data Oasis will be expanded to serve SDSC's Gordon, the first supercomputer within the HPC community focused on integrating large amounts of flash-based SSD (solid state drive) memory.

As Gordon enters production in January 2012, SDSC will double the speed of Data Oasis to 100GB/s, making it one of the fastest parallel file systems in the academic research community.