NEWS BRIEFS
Santa Clara, CA — Citing high reliability and fast network performance, Texas Instruments’ Stafford Site has added two Auspex 4Front NS2000 Enterprise systems to its seven-system configuration of Auspex Systems network-attached storage (NAS) solutions. The upgrade gives this location a whopping ten terabytes of storage capacity.
Digital signal processor and microcontroller design, and testing for Sun Microsystems SPARC processors are main functions at Texas Instruments’ Stafford Site. The layout, verification and testing of these designs generate massive files, which is why TI has purchased Auspex servers since 1990.
“Just this morning, we were looking at a single output file 3.6 gigabytes in size,” said Jeffrey Thomas, the site’s manager of workstation support. “That’s becoming typical. The transistor counts on a single chip can reach into the tens of millions. Verification tools look at each and every transistor and the connections between, generating an immense output.” Thomas notes that the SPARC layout files supplied by Sun also consume server space. Each is typically 2GB, and the files generated during verification are considerably larger.
Thomas said that TI upgraded to the NS2000 systems based on Auspex’s “rock solid reliability” and fast recovery in the unlikely event of equipment failure. “While no system stays up forever, the Auspex systems are as close as we can get, running about a year without a hitch,” he said. “And with the NS2000 systems, recovery is nearly instant: six to eight minutes versus up to 18 hours on conventional file servers.” This fast recovery is due to Auspex’s FastFLO 64-Bit Journaling File System, which logs files changes. During a recovery, the journal saves the system from having to recheck every byte on the disk.
Fast performance was also a factor. The Auspex NS2000 systems support Gigabit Ethernet, enabling the group to add a high-speed network interface between the systems and Sun Enterprise 5500 compute servers, which TI uses for high-speed number crunching. “Putting this ‘big pipe’ between the Auspex file servers and Sun compute servers gave us a large performance boost,” Thomas said.
With the group’s nine Auspex systems still growing, the group is considering an additional NS2000 system next year.
For more information visit http://www.auspex.com
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