NASA’s Infrared Processing and Analysis Center performs all the infrared processing and study of ground- and space-based telescopes. IPAC’s responsibilities are monumental under the best of conditions, given that the cameras used in these telescopes are getting more sophisticated and require more processing power and storage capability than ever.
But NASA has strict protocols for budgeting hardware and software used in various projects such as IPAC’s. “Because of the NASA budget and the way NASA works, we cannot share hardware with each other. Project A cannot buy hardware [or] software and let project B use it. Each project has to stand on its own,” says Eugean Hacopians, IPAC senior systems engineer (www.ipac.caltech.edu).
Hacopians was looking for a software-based shared storage solution for his latest project, the Palomar Transient Factor, or PTF, in which IPAC would monitor the Palomar telescope, which would be scanning and capturing information on 80 to 90% of the night sky. This solution needed to set up and maintain a transparent storage setup using existing hardware, provide NFS (network file system) connectivity no matter how many nodes were added to the computer cluster, and prevent bottlenecks from occurring.
Then Hacopians was introduced to Exanodes, a software-based SIS (shared internal storage) solution from Seanodes (www.seanodes.com). Exanodes was one of the few solutions that Hacopians could afford because it did not require IPAC to purchase additional hardware on which to run it. To Hacopians’ surprise and delight, Exanodes not only has performed as advertised, it also has additional benefits that will make it fairly easy to build out the PTF cluster as it grows to 300 to 500TB in size.
Complete Article: Smooth Connectivity: Exanodes Provides NASA Division With Reliable, Scalable File Server Connections
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