That is what happens when the govenment decides that you can never delete any of your data. Ever. Of course, we can help you with those issues. Seriously. If you can’t delete any of your data – ever – call us immediatly. We will save you a bunch of time and heartache.

But what if you had to process that data at a Terabyte a SECOND!?! Yeah, seriously. If you have this requirement – call us immediatly. We will save you a bunch of time and heartache.

Realizing that 90% of my reader’s don’t have a need to process a Terabyte a second, you should still keep readin this press release. This will blow you away!

*Teaser – If every one of the 6.7 billion people on earth had a hand calculator and worked together on a calculation 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, it would take 320 years to accomplish what Sequoia will be able to do in one hour.*

U.S. Department of Energy Selects NetApp as the Storage Foundation for One of the World’s Most Powerful Supercomputers

SUNNYVALE, Calif.—September 28, 2011— Individuals, federal agencies, and enterprises are producing data at massive scale and unprecedented velocity. The demand to consume, store, and analyze this information is driving innovations and opportunities for organizations that are looking to harness intelligence in the big-data economy. NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP) is working closely with leaders across all sectors to unlock new insights that will change the way organizations manage and use data. NetApp today announced that the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) has selected the company to provide the storage foundation for its Sequoia supercomputer.

Sequoia, which will be deployed in 2012 at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in Livermore, California, is expected to be one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers, managing massive compute workloads where real-time analytics, scalable performance, and secure storage are mission critical.

LLNL is a DoE/National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) laboratory with a primary mission of ensuring the safety, security, and reliability of the nation’s aging nuclear deterrent without underground testing. Other missions that leverage the lab’s high-performance computing capabilities include nonproliferation, counterterrorism, energy security, and understanding climate change.

Sequoia will be used for a variety of scientific and engineering applications that require the most advanced and innovative high-performance computing capabilities. Calculations will primarily focus on LLNL’s nuclear security mission, as well as on other national security challenges. Sequoia is expected to be twice as fast as today’s most powerful system and will have a peak speed of twenty thousand trillion arithmetic operations per second. As a point of comparison, if every one of the 6.7 billion people on earth had a hand calculator and worked together on a calculation 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, it would take 320 years to accomplish what Sequoia will be able to do in one hour.

“Sequoia’s supercomputing capabilities will provide LLNL with the ability to assess the accuracy of various nuclear weapons simulations. The simulations are fundamental to ensuring the viability of the nation’s nuclear weapons program without having to actively test them and also provide valuable insight into the underpinning science,” said Michel McCoy, program director of LLNL’s Advanced Simulation and Computing program. “Because of the system’s extraordinary capabilities, we need a storage infrastructure that will deliver the extreme performance, scalability, and reliability that are optimal for the taxing applications that we run.”

To store and manage all of this critical data, LLNL will leverage a solution built on 55PB of NetApp® E-Series storage that will provide over 1TB/sec to the Lustre file system.

“The Sequoia system will enable LLNL to open up new doors for scientific discovery and exploration,” said Addison Snell, CEO, Intersect360 Research. “The NetApp E-Series storage platform will play a vital role in Sequoia’s ability to process, manage, and store the immense amount of data and information required for its various workloads.”

“More and more organizations in the federal sector are taking advantage of the immense computing power that big data technology provides, and LLNL is a great example of that,” said Mark Weber, president of U.S. Public Sector, NetApp. “NetApp is working closely with organizations like LLNL throughout the U.S. government to provide the innovative storage solutions required today to solve the challenges of tomorrow. We are honored to provide LLNL the storage foundation for what will be one of the world’s most impressive supercomputers.”

Posted in Infrastructure, 2nd November 2011 09:38 GMT
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/11/02/netapp_specsfs2008/)

NetApp doesn’t do scale-out clustering, everyone knows that. Oh but it does, and it has whacked Isilon firmly in its scaled-out cluster with a SPECSfs2008 benchmark that is 36 per cent faster using half the disks and 116 fewer nodes.

EMC Isilon was the top SPECsfs2008 NFS dog with 1,112,705 IOPS recorded from a 140-node S200 cluster with 3,360 disk drives and a overall response time of2.54msecs. That bested a Huawei Symantec N8500, which did 636,036 IOPS; an all-flash VNX 5700, which did 497,632; an IBM SONAS system, which did 403,326; and – almost laughably by today’s SPECSfs2008 standards – a NetApp FAS6080, which did 120,011.

Now NetApp has clustered 24 FAS6240 nodes together in an ONTAP 8.1 cluster and run it more than 10 times faster than that lone FAS6080, achieving 1.51 million IOPS with an overall response time of 1.53msecs. There were 1,728 450GB, 15,000rpm disk drives and the FAS6240s were fitted with Flash Cache.

NetApp’s UK Systems Engineering director, Jeremy Wallis, said: “At list price we were two-thirds of the Isilon price.”

He said that the E-Series arrays were positioned for specific niche markets, such as high-bandwidth business analytics, whereas ONTAP clusters were for core data centre applications. NFS was the main requirement and the company has no plans to run a CIFS version of the SPECsfs2008 benchmark, he said.

Simply put, the ONTAP 8.1 cluster was more efficient at driving its single tier of disks, with exported capacity of 288TB and no short-stroking, than Isilon with its 3,360 disks and a 864TB exported capacity.

El Reg wonders how an all-flash VNX 5500-F would do? Wallis agreed that it would be possible to build an all-flash system that might surpass the NetApp result but it would likely come at a huge cost and so be ruled out of real-world use.

He added that the scaling in IOPS as NetApp built the cluster from 4 nodes, to 8 and so on in 4-node chunks, was linearwith no sign of any performance drop-off. Presumably then it could continuescaling out as there is no architectural limit set at 24 nodes.

NetApp couldn’t have a better launchpad from which to impress upon potential ONTAP 8.1 customers that it has finally integrated the Spinnaker technology into ONTAP with sparkling results. Cluster mode works. ®

We hope all our wonderful customers and friends has a safe and happy 4th of July weekend! Come back and see the website in its completion after your long holiday weekend!

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness….”

- The Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776.

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