The Pawsey Centre
The Pawsey Supercomputing Centre has tapped Dell and Xenon Technology Group to upgrade its storage prowess in a deal worth $7 million collectively.
The duo will provide 130 petabytes of online and offline storage as part of the Western Australia centre’s $70 million refresh project.
According to Pawsey, this will make it one of the largest research-focused object storage systems in the world.
The new storage solution will also be the second-biggest deal awarded as part of Pawsey’s capital refresh behind the Setonix supercomputing system itself, which formed a $48 million contract awarded to Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE).
“When researchers want to make massive amounts of data available to users on the internet, any delay in accessing data is very hard to accommodate,” said Mark Gray, head of scientific platforms at Pawsey.
“Users and most web tools expect files to be immediately available and the time it takes for a tape system to retrieve data becomes a challenge.”
The installation of the 130PB data storage system will consist of a disk-based system powered by Dell, named Acacia after Australia’s national floral emblem, the golden wattle -- Acacia pycnantha.
This will provide 60PB of high-speed object storage for hosting research data online. The multi-tiered cluster separates different types of data to improve data availability.
Meanwhile, supercomputing specialist Xenon will provide an offline storage solution named Banksia, after another Australian wildflower.
This will incorporate Pawsey’s current object storage infrastructure, including two mirrored libraries each holding 70PB of data, duplicated for data security.
Pawsey has also invested in Ceph, software for building storage systems out of generic hardware, and has built the online storage infrastructure around Ceph in-house. As more servers are added, the online object storage becomes more stable, resilient and even faster, the centre claimed.
“An important part of this long-term storage upgrade was to demonstrate how it can be done in a financially scalable way,” Gray added. “In a world of mega-science projects like the Square Kilometre Array, we need to develop more cost-effective ways of providing massive storage.”
The latest evolution in Pawsey’s data storage infrastructure is intended to be ready for user migration before the end of 2021.
