Cray has announced it 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 will be used to provide the HLRN with a data management solution for its High Performance Computing Center (RRZN) located at Leibniz University in Hannover, Germany.
The Cray TAS solution will provide RRZN users with a large-scale archiving system to actively access, manage and preserve important data resulting from the centre's scientific research in the fields of environmental research, climate and ocean modelling, physics, chemistry, bioinformatics, engineering, and fluid dynamics.
The 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 path to move from its existing Oracle SAM-QFS installation to Cray TAS.
‘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 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 is designed to eliminate the complexities associated with planning, designing, and building large-scale archives.
Cray TAS 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.
