This week’s storage news roundup features Weka going to Mars, Scality going to jail, and host of supporting stories.
WekaIO goes to Mars
NASA is using WekaIO to feed file data to four Nvidia GPUs for Mars lander descent simulations.
The lander arrives at Mars travelling at 12,000mph and slows its descent using retro-propulsion. This takes seven minutes from arrival to touch down. The Martian atmosphere is too thin for a parachute-slowed descent. NASA’s simulation examines how the rocket exhaust interacts with the Martian atmosphere in real time.
A NASA video tells us this involved 150TB of data and took a one week run on Summit at Oak Ridge National Laboratories, with more than 27,000 Nvidia GPUs to produce the simulation dataset. This volumetric data contains about 1 billion data points, each with seven attributes.
The simulation can be played in realtime with help from WekaFS. The system stores the data set files on NVMe SSDs, with data fed in parallel at 160GB/sec to four GPUs via Nvidia’s GPU Direct, thus bypassing their host server CPU and DRAM. Without GPU Direct the bandwidth drops to just over 30GB/sec.
Scality goes to Irish jail
The Irish Prison Service (IPS) is using Scality RING storage to store videos from 5,000 video cameras spread across 12 jails and around 4,000 inmates. To conform with Irish data protection rules, the footage has to be stored for a minimum of four years and one day or until an incident is resolved.
Scality RING replaced an unnamed storage array which came under capacity pressure after the IPS installed new high-definition cameras, that generated larger video files. Amazingly, footage from the traditional storage array had never been deleted,and the IPS lacked the visibility and a technical process for systematically deleting video.
There are three suppliers involved in the IPS video surveillance IT system: HPE, CTERA and Scality. HPE provides local storage using CTERA running on HPE DL380 servers to capture video 24/7 at each prison facility (5TB/server). Long-term offsite storage is on HPE Apollo 4000 servers and Scality RING.
Two Scality RING object storage clouds, with replication between them, provide 300TB of storage that can scales to multiple petabytes, and supports automated and systematic deletion.
News shorts
Alluxio, an open source cloud data orchestration system developer, said it closed out 1H 2020 with sales growth of more than 650 per cent over 1H 2019. Recent notable additions include Alibaba, Aunalytics, Datasapiens, EA, Nielsen, Playtika, Roblox, Ryte, Tencent, VIPShop, Walmart, Walkme and WeRide.
The Fibre Channel Industry Association has published the FC-NVMe-2 standard. Enhancements include Sequence Level Error Recovery (SLER), which significantly increases the speed at which bit errors are detected and recovered during data transmission.
HYCU says it is the first Nutanix Strategic Technology Partner to have a data protection product that has been tested and supports Nutanix Clusters on AWS.
IDC market watchers have forecast the size of the on-premises enterprise installed storage base from 2020 to 2024 in a “Worldwide Enterprise Storage Systems Installed Base Forecast, 2020-2024” report. They have estimated the installed base by deployment location, product category and storage class. They discuss the market context and drivers, looking at all-flash arrays, HCI, and the effect of Covid-19.
InfiniteIO has released v2.5 of its file metadata acceleration software. This goes faster with enhanced memory, processor and 40GbitE network connectivity to reduce metadata latency from 77µs to as low as 40µs in a single node. The new release adds NAS migration via hybrid cloud tiering, data tiering, and enhanced analytics.
N2SW’s v3.1 Backup & Recovery provides replication between AWS S3 buckets across regions and accounts, Amazon EBS snapshot copy to S3 for long-term archiving, custom tag integration; recovery drill scheduling and cross-region DR for Amazon Elastic File System (EFS).
Pivot3 says it is the first HCI vendor to be certified for the Bosch video management system (BVMS) from Bosch’s Building Technologies division.
Tableau customers can rapidly ingest data, enabling exploration, analysis, correlation and visualisation of significantly more data with more dimensions by using a SQream Connector. This is available in the Tableau Extension Gallery.
Storage array vendor StorOne has produced a white paper advising storage admins and CIOs on how to cope with the next pandemic.
The ICM Brain and Spine Institute has selected Western Digital’s OpenFlex open composable infrastructure, with F3100 NVME drives, to speed up work on cures and treatments.
