Customer Stories

posted on 30 July 2008 09:24

Seanodes has had an astronomical customer win - a NASA facility at Caltech storing data from the Palomar Observatory, north of San Diego County.

NASA's IPAC (Infrared Processing and Analysis Center) is setting up a 4-year Palomar Transient Factory (PTF) project which will capture night sky images from the Oschin 48-inch telescope at Palomar (pictured left) in an attempt to detect and follow supernova events by registering changes in their spectroscopic data over time. This will involve something like 30,000 images of up to 30million astronomic objects per night (on clear nights), meaning around 40GB of data every 24 hours. The project team estimates there could be 42 billion images stored over the life of the project.

The Exanodes software converts servers' unused internal disks and direct-attached Storage (DAS) into a clustered shared storage array providing a single logical pool of storage. HPC applications like the PTF can marry unused disk space found in many server and storage clusters with existing or additional dedicated storage hardware to provide a  shared storage pool. Exanodes abstracts the storage layer from the physical devices enabling users to select the hardware and connectivity options that suit their environment,

IPAC chose Exanodes because it reckoned the software met its need for 'high speed disk storage with total resiliency to meet the extremely data-intensive demands and large scale data growth of the project.' It is in the process of building out a multi-node Exanodes clustered set up at a price point significantly less than a traditional single controller SATA RAID array, IPAC not being exactly awash with cash.

Eugean Hacopians, An IPAC senior systems engineer, said: "Seanodes is the most promising storage technology I’ve come across in years. “I’ve found it to be a simple to deploy and manage architecture that is robust, highly resilient and very cost effective. To me it represents the foundation of a new era of storage architecture – one in which storage systems exist independent of physical hardware and are much faster, much more flexible and utterly fault tolerant. We are very excited about the independence and performance that the Seanodes approach will provide in deploying future upgrades and expanded data storage requirements.”

Jacques Baldinger, Seanodes CEO, said: “Exanodes is truly a industry-changing approach that provides the option to leverage available space across existing multi-node server environments and utilize standard, off the shelf commoditized storage hardware to deliver ground-breaking benefits for even the most data-intense organizations.”

It's a very good and very visible win for Seanodes and its technology.

^{[B&F staff.]}