What's in store

 

Connecting state and local government leaders

As rich media files in various formats contribute to your ever-expanding storage requirements, a clustered-storage approach could be the answer.

A growing demand for digital content ' audio, images, video, satellite imagery ' is sparking the need for more sophisticated systems to manage and store this digital tsunami.

Take for instance, NASA's World Wind program, an open-source, virtual globe that lets online users explore the Earth and its terrain through high-resolution 3-D imagery.

Information technology administrators handling World Wind at NASA Ames Research Center needed a storage system that would let them consolidate a massive collection of satellite images into a single global name directory for simplified workflow, and to give users immediate access to content.

Or consider the case of Vandenberg Air Force Base, where the media production department films, edits, stores and analyzes footage of a number of spacecraft and missile programs.

The department is moving to a digitized world, as manufacturers stop making 35- and 16-millimeter equipment.

The media production employees currently use a variety of 35- and 16-mm, SD and HD video cameras to capture space flights ' sometimes resulting in feature-length films ' originating from the base that carry weather satellites and other payloads into orbit. A small project can include 12 to 15 terabytes of data, said Stan Bellew, a media specialist with the 30th Space Communications Squadron at Vandenberg. Larger projects can include more than 45 T of data and, in the near future, could even reach petabyte size.

To handle these large loads, both NASA and Vandenberg deployed clustered storage systems to handle massive amounts of data and digital content.

Typically, clustered storage solutions provide a single logical storage system, so any application can access any piece of data stored on it through any storage controller in the cluster, no matter how large the overall volume of data, according to a report from Enterprise Storage Group. A true storage system also provides aggregation of all hardware resources as a single system, ESG said.



Data chunks

For World Wind, NASA used Isilon System's IQ clustered storage. NASA pulls Landsat 7 satellite imagery and Shuttle Radar Topography Mission data to enable Word Wind online users to zoom in any place on Earth to view its surface.

World Wind works with a company called I-cubed, which performs complex geoprocessing to convert raw satellite data into a high-resolution image.

That data is then sent to a Microsoft .Net-based application for staging and online delivery. World Wind's traditional storage limited I-cubed's processing applications, making it difficult for World Wind to process satellite data and deliver content to users, NASA officials said.

'We have a whole bunch of systems that respond to requests for data, but they need to pull that raw content ' which is very large chunks of information ' from somewhere,' said Randy Kim, general developer at NASA World Wind. It wasn't practical to store the information on traditional storage devices because the data was too big, he said.

'That's where the Isilon machine comes into play,' Kim said. 'It holds all of our original data. Not only is it able to host a lot of in-and-out traffic, but literally it is a safeguard for our information. We know that the data we keep on that box is not going anywhere.'

Isilon offers storage systems ' called nodes ' that consist of CPUs, memory, processor power, networking capabilities and hard drives. IQ's cluster architecture allows these nodes to be grouped together to act as one by One File System, Isilon's operating system software, said Sam Grocott, the company's senior director of product management.

The IQ system can scale from 4 terabytes to 1.6 petabytes in a single file system.
The IQ architecture includes software applications that provide data availability management and protection capabilities.

Traditional network-attached storage (NAS) and storage-attached network (SANs) devices were built for structured block and file data ' basically text-based data, Grocott said. But growing demand for audio, video and graphics requires something built from the ground up to handle this unstructured content, he said.

NASA deployed a four-node cluster of Isilon IQ 3000 units. There are 3 terabytes to each node, Grocott said, so NASA has 12 terabytes within that single file system.

World Wind has consolidated more than 8,000 large Landsat 7 satellite images into one single volume and single file system. This boosts performance and access for geoprocessing of the data and to Word Wind's technicians to stage and deliver processed images to users.

Kim noted that the system can be used for data exchange as well as for hosting data. 'By the time the satellite image gets to a personal computer, it has to go through a lot of preprocessing,' he said.

Isilon 'can take a lot of bandwidth,' Kim said, 'especially if it is on a local-area network.'

Rocket movies

IT workers at Vandenberg Air Force chose SGI's InfiniteStorage Clustered Extended File System (CXFS). Besides filming spacecraft missions, the media facility will record and evaluate the testing of missile-intercept vehicles launched from Vandenberg.

'Before, we would faint at the sight of a gigabyte file,' Bellew said. Now files are in the terabytes, he said. Camera crews are shooting anywhere from 240 to 240,000 frames within minutes. A traditional dedicated disk array storage system just could not handle the data volume, he said.

Now, the media team can download a data set from a camera, process it and have it ready for conformity and review in 20 minutes; before, it would take a whole day. Film is sent to the Defense Department or various other agencies, he said.

CXFS works in conjunction with the SGI InfiniteStorage SAN. The SAN provides high-speed connections between multiple hosts and disk storage. CXFS provides the software infrastructure that allows simultaneous shared access to that storage.

'CXFS allows users to add more storage and then have multiple clients access that same storage pool,' said Raj Das, vice president of storage at SGI. 'But [in addition to accessing] the same storage pool, CXFS allows multiple clients to read and write the same file and we handle all the semantics behind it.'

Vandenberg is a classic user of clustered storage, he said. Users of digital media files like to work on the same file or film because they have multiple processes.
Without clustered storage, they would have to make multiple copies of the file ' which is inefficient because they're spending more money on storage to keep multiple copies of the same data, Das said.

Multiple copies also create a synchronization problem, because they have different people in the workflow process on the project. Then they have to combine all of the work after it is done.

'The advantage with a true clustered file system is that you have a single copy of the data and you have multiple parts of the workflow working on the same data,' Das said. One copy of the data also makes management easier, he said.

A slew of other companies offer different implementations of clustered storage, including 3PAR, BluArc, Data Direct Networks, EMC, EqualLogic, Exanet Ibrix and LeftHand.

For example, Ibrix Fusion is scalable, parallel file-serving suite, said Milan Shetti, vice president of marketing at Ibrix. It has an integrated Scalable Volume Manager function that lets users deploy and configure a common storage pool and single namespace using any combination of SAN-attached or direct-attached storage.

Some of the other Ibrix components include Fusion High Availability, a clustering solution that provides failover capabilities; FusionManager, an interface for administering and monitoring Ibrix Fusion clusters and file systems; FusionSnap, a file recovery feature; and FusionFileReplication, which create replicas of an individual file.

NAS and SAN vendors are also looking to move into this space.
For example, Hewlett-Packard recently bought Polyserve, which has technologies that could help the company move its legacy architecture to a clustered environment in the future.

Meanwhile, Network Appliance's acquisition of Spinnaker three years ago has borne fruit. NetApps now offers the ONTAP GX system.

Demand could pick up in government beyond the research and science and defense sectors, said Ken Terry, senior manager for the public sector at BearingPoint.
As federal agencies increasingly collect massive amounts of unstructured data, there will be a demand for systems that can store, retrieve and manage that information, Terry said.
According to 'The Clustered Storage Revolution,' a white paper from Isilon Systems (GCN.com/865), a clustered-storage system pulls together two or more storage devices to behave as a single entity.

The white paper states that clustered storage can be broken down into three types: failover clustering, namespace aggregation and clustered storage with a distributed file systems.

Failover clustering is keeping a second, redundant copy of the data, which can be used in case the main source becomes available.

Namepsace aggregation means that data across all nodes is indexed in a central location, or namespace. This approach allows data to be kept in a wide variety of storage systems and be viewed as a single entity (GCN.com/866).

Clustered storage with distributed file systems also offers users a single view into all the data across all data resources. In this case, however, that data is kept at the node level, rather than at a central location. Nodes can be distributed across the entire network. In Isilon's view, this provides the most robust way to store data. 'Each node in the cluster is a coherent peer, meaning each node knows everything about the other,' according to the white paper.

' Joab Jackson
Do you have a lot of digital content but want to keep costs low? While clustered storage is one way to go, take a look at another emerging approach based on the Internet Small Computer Serial Interface, or iSCSI.

Clackamas County, Ore., scrapped a five-year-old IBM Fibre Channel storage-area network for an iSCSI SAN from EqualLogic to tackle the county's application growth.
'The big thing we've had to solve is the explosion in storage requirements and the ability to manage that,' said Chris Fricke, a senior microcomputer specialist with the county.

'E-mail, document imaging and digital media such as movies and maps and all those services that are being offered by the county is growing exponentially and we needed a way to manage all of that,' he said. 'So everything is hosted off our EqualLogic iSCSI SAN.'

Approved by the Internet Engineering Task Force in February 2003 as a standard for communicating with computer components over a network, iSCSI encapsulates SCSI commands in TCP/IP packets so they can go out over an IP-based network. This allows computers to access disks on the network in the same way they access internal disks. iSCSI can cut the costs of storage considerably because commodity networking equipment can be used, eliminating the need for Fibre Channel, which requires specialized cabling, switches and adapter cards. SCSI disks also tend to be cheaper and require no specialized training beyond basic system administration skills to manage.

Clackamas County, near Mount Hood, is home to more than 338,000 people. The information technology department of 50 employees manages internal and external IT activities for more than 2,000 users.

'The biggest thing we're doing now, storage-wise, is virtualizing our servers,' Fricke said.

The IT department is deploying VMWare virtualization software, combining application servers and Microsoft SQL servers as well as Exchange servers. Fricke wants a more virtual environment so systems can quickly fail over to another site in the event of emergencies. He wants to be able to replicate data and host servers where it makes sense without provisioning hardware to do it.

Fricke just completed an upgrade on the three-year-old system with no downtime or interruptions.

'None of the things that you have to deal with Fibre Channel are there ' no custom cabling, zoning issues nor vendor-centric hardware,' he said. 'When you want to connect devices to storage, you have multiple options.'

X
This website uses cookies to enhance user experience and to analyze performance and traffic on our website. We also share information about your use of our site with our social media, advertising and analytics partners. Learn More / Do Not Sell My Personal Information
Accept Cookies
X
Cookie Preferences Cookie List

Do Not Sell My Personal Information

When you visit our website, we store cookies on your browser to collect information. The information collected might relate to you, your preferences or your device, and is mostly used to make the site work as you expect it to and to provide a more personalized web experience. However, you can choose not to allow certain types of cookies, which may impact your experience of the site and the services we are able to offer. Click on the different category headings to find out more and change our default settings according to your preference. You cannot opt-out of our First Party Strictly Necessary Cookies as they are deployed in order to ensure the proper functioning of our website (such as prompting the cookie banner and remembering your settings, to log into your account, to redirect you when you log out, etc.). For more information about the First and Third Party Cookies used please follow this link.

Allow All Cookies

Manage Consent Preferences

Strictly Necessary Cookies - Always Active

We do not allow you to opt-out of our certain cookies, as they are necessary to ensure the proper functioning of our website (such as prompting our cookie banner and remembering your privacy choices) and/or to monitor site performance. These cookies are not used in a way that constitutes a “sale” of your data under the CCPA. You can set your browser to block or alert you about these cookies, but some parts of the site will not work as intended if you do so. You can usually find these settings in the Options or Preferences menu of your browser. Visit www.allaboutcookies.org to learn more.

Sale of Personal Data, Targeting & Social Media Cookies

Under the California Consumer Privacy Act, you have the right to opt-out of the sale of your personal information to third parties. These cookies collect information for analytics and to personalize your experience with targeted ads. You may exercise your right to opt out of the sale of personal information by using this toggle switch. If you opt out we will not be able to offer you personalised ads and will not hand over your personal information to any third parties. Additionally, you may contact our legal department for further clarification about your rights as a California consumer by using this Exercise My Rights link

If you have enabled privacy controls on your browser (such as a plugin), we have to take that as a valid request to opt-out. Therefore we would not be able to track your activity through the web. This may affect our ability to personalize ads according to your preferences.

Targeting cookies may be set through our site by our advertising partners. They may be used by those companies to build a profile of your interests and show you relevant adverts on other sites. They do not store directly personal information, but are based on uniquely identifying your browser and internet device. If you do not allow these cookies, you will experience less targeted advertising.

Social media cookies are set by a range of social media services that we have added to the site to enable you to share our content with your friends and networks. They are capable of tracking your browser across other sites and building up a profile of your interests. This may impact the content and messages you see on other websites you visit. If you do not allow these cookies you may not be able to use or see these sharing tools.

If you want to opt out of all of our lead reports and lists, please submit a privacy request at our Do Not Sell page.

Save Settings
Cookie Preferences Cookie List

Cookie List

A cookie is a small piece of data (text file) that a website – when visited by a user – asks your browser to store on your device in order to remember information about you, such as your language preference or login information. Those cookies are set by us and called first-party cookies. We also use third-party cookies – which are cookies from a domain different than the domain of the website you are visiting – for our advertising and marketing efforts. More specifically, we use cookies and other tracking technologies for the following purposes:

Strictly Necessary Cookies

We do not allow you to opt-out of our certain cookies, as they are necessary to ensure the proper functioning of our website (such as prompting our cookie banner and remembering your privacy choices) and/or to monitor site performance. These cookies are not used in a way that constitutes a “sale” of your data under the CCPA. You can set your browser to block or alert you about these cookies, but some parts of the site will not work as intended if you do so. You can usually find these settings in the Options or Preferences menu of your browser. Visit www.allaboutcookies.org to learn more.

Functional Cookies

We do not allow you to opt-out of our certain cookies, as they are necessary to ensure the proper functioning of our website (such as prompting our cookie banner and remembering your privacy choices) and/or to monitor site performance. These cookies are not used in a way that constitutes a “sale” of your data under the CCPA. You can set your browser to block or alert you about these cookies, but some parts of the site will not work as intended if you do so. You can usually find these settings in the Options or Preferences menu of your browser. Visit www.allaboutcookies.org to learn more.

Performance Cookies

We do not allow you to opt-out of our certain cookies, as they are necessary to ensure the proper functioning of our website (such as prompting our cookie banner and remembering your privacy choices) and/or to monitor site performance. These cookies are not used in a way that constitutes a “sale” of your data under the CCPA. You can set your browser to block or alert you about these cookies, but some parts of the site will not work as intended if you do so. You can usually find these settings in the Options or Preferences menu of your browser. Visit www.allaboutcookies.org to learn more.

Sale of Personal Data

We also use cookies to personalize your experience on our websites, including by determining the most relevant content and advertisements to show you, and to monitor site traffic and performance, so that we may improve our websites and your experience. You may opt out of our use of such cookies (and the associated “sale” of your Personal Information) by using this toggle switch. You will still see some advertising, regardless of your selection. Because we do not track you across different devices, browsers and GEMG properties, your selection will take effect only on this browser, this device and this website.

Social Media Cookies

We also use cookies to personalize your experience on our websites, including by determining the most relevant content and advertisements to show you, and to monitor site traffic and performance, so that we may improve our websites and your experience. You may opt out of our use of such cookies (and the associated “sale” of your Personal Information) by using this toggle switch. You will still see some advertising, regardless of your selection. Because we do not track you across different devices, browsers and GEMG properties, your selection will take effect only on this browser, this device and this website.

Targeting Cookies

We also use cookies to personalize your experience on our websites, including by determining the most relevant content and advertisements to show you, and to monitor site traffic and performance, so that we may improve our websites and your experience. You may opt out of our use of such cookies (and the associated “sale” of your Personal Information) by using this toggle switch. You will still see some advertising, regardless of your selection. Because we do not track you across different devices, browsers and GEMG properties, your selection will take effect only on this browser, this device and this website.