SEATTLE, Wash., April 8 — Global supercomputer leader Cray Inc. today announced the Company has been awarded a contract to deliver a Cray Tiered Adaptive Storage (TAS) solution to the North German Supercomputing Alliance (HLRN). Cray TAS is an open storage and archiving solution for big data and high performance computing environments, and gives HLRN a long-term data management solution for its High Performance Computing Center (RRZN) located at Leibniz University in Hannover, Germany.

The Cray TAS solution will provide RRZN’s users with a large-scale archiving system to actively access, manage and preserve important data resulting from the Center’s scientific research in the fields of environmental research, climate and ocean modeling, physics, chemistry, bioinformatics, engineering, and fluid dynamics. This Cray TAS installation consists of more than one petabyte of data storage and is upgradeable to more than 75 petabytes within the delivered architecture. For RRZN, Cray TAS provided a fast path to move from its existing Oracle SAM-QFS installation to Cray TAS without a lengthy data migration period.

“It is important that our supercomputing infrastructure includes a flexible, scalable and simple storage archiving solution that supports the massive demand for supercomputing resources from across the northern states of Germany,” said PD Dr. Steffen Schulze-Kremer, head of HPC department at RRZN. “Cray’s Tiered Adaptive Storage solution seamlessly integrates with our existing supercomputing systems, and is expected to fulfill our storage needs now and into the future.”

Cray TAS features the Versity Storage Manager, includes all software and hardware, and eliminates complexities associated with planning, designing, and building large-scale archives. Cray TAS provides for data protection and accessibility at scale, and can be provisioned as a primary file storage system with tiers, as well as a persistent storage archive. It provides transparent data migration across storage tiers – from fast scratch to primary and archive storage, and features up to four flexible storage tiers mixing media, solid state drive, disk or tape.

“The supercomputing facilities at RRZN support a wide array of complex scientific research, and we are pleased to provide the Center with an end-to-end data management solution that can meet and grow with the big data needs of their scientists and researchers,” said Barry Bolding, Cray’s vice president of storage and data management. “Cray TAS allows for a seamless upgrade from RRZN’s existing archiving solution, including the ability to continue to use their current policy engines. With the explosion of big data, we believe that Cray TAS fills a gap in the marketplace for customers who need enterprise-class data management solutions with high performance and low total-cost-of-ownership. Cray is providing a compelling solution for customers like RRZN that need active access to big data for their scientific workflow and a strong roadmap for their future data-tiering needs.”

The Cray TAS solution is the latest addition to Cray’s portfolio of storage and data management offerings. Cray also offers a storage appliance solution using Cray Sonexion – a scale out Lustre storage system that vastly reduces deployment time and simplifies storage management for high performance data. Cray Sonexion addresses a broad range of customers as it provides performance scalability from gigabytes to terabytes per-second in a single file system and performs optimally at scale.

The Company recently introduced Cray Cluster Connect, a Lustre storage solution for x86 Linux clusters. Cray Cluster Connect is a compute agnostic storage and data management offering that allows customers to utilize their Linux compute environment of choice – providing customers with a complete, end-to-end, Lustre solution consisting of hardware, networking, software, architecture and support. Cray is also an original founder and board member of OpenSFS – a consortium focused on advancing Lustre capabilities and keeping Lustre open – and is following the OpenSFS roadmap for Lustre.

Additional information on the Cray Tiered Adaptive Storage and Cray’s scalable storage solutions can be found on the Cray website.

About HLRN

The North-German Supercomputing Alliance (Norddeutscher Verbund für Hoch- und Höchstleistungsrechnen – HLRN) is a joint project of the seven North-German states of Berlin, Brandenburg, Bremen, Hamburg, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Niedersachsen, and Schleswig-Holstein, and was established in 2001. The HLRN alliance jointly operates a distributed supercomputer system hosted at Zuse Institute Berlin (ZIB) and at Regionales Rechenzentrum für Niedersachen (RRZN) at Leibniz University Hannover.

About Cray Inc.

Global supercomputing leader Cray Inc. provides innovative systems and solutions enabling scientists and engineers in industry, academia and government to meet existing and future simulation and analytics challenges. Leveraging 40 years of experience in developing and servicing the world’s most advanced supercomputers, Cray offers a comprehensive portfolio of supercomputers and Big Data storage and analytics solutions delivering unrivaled performance, efficiency and scalability. Cray’s Adaptive Supercomputing vision is focused on delivering innovative next-generation products that integrate diverse processing technologies into a unified architecture, allowing customers to meet the market’s continued demand for realized performance. Go to www.cray.com for more information.

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Source: Cray Inc.