Intelligent Storage Comes to Campus
Sun StorageTek 5800 delivers a petabyte of storage with brains and brawn
 Infrastructure ranks high on the EDUCAUSE annual list of top IT issues — no doubt in part because of the exploding need for storage. Academic institutions, government agencies, and libraries are all struggling with how to digitize, preserve, and distribute vast amounts of diverse multimedia content.
Academic "cybrarians" face a host of sophisticated IT issues related to storage — data sprawl, poor search, slow retrieval, limited metadata, growing storage database licensing fees, and nagging data integrity declines. Many are juggling 20-plus terabytes of unstructured files in their fixed archive or distribution systems.
If your fixed-content data archive consists of a database, a custom storage application, and a third-party search engine that all rely on a file structure scheme, it can be tough to sustain mission-critical performance. With traditional solutions, you've no doubt been confronted with such issues as skyrocketing administrative costs, license fees, reliability problems, technology migration nightmares, and user complaints.
Code-named "Honeycomb," the Sun StorageTek 5800 system helps you bring these issues under control so you can focus on your academic mission rather than your archiving infrastructure. In fact, Sun designed the Sun StorageTek 5800 system from the ground up for the large data repository applications used by the educational, healthcare, historical, and scientific communities.
Sun combined a fully native design with world-class systems expertise to create a storage system that runs the Solaris 10 Operating System and leverages Java technology development tools to drive a closer integration between compute and store assets. Using this breakthrough architecture, this tightly integrated system provides online access to data, robust indexing, and native search capabilities with extensive fault-tolerant metadata, or "data about data." Plus, it delivers the seamless scalability, data integrity, and advanced data management features that academic institutions need.
An Integrated Stack of Intelligent Technologies
The Sun StorageTek 5800 system delivers instant relief for large-scale archives or distribution. Now you can centralize up to a petabyte of write-once read-many (WORM) unstructured data files in a system designed just for that purpose. Consolidate and archive desktop files or distribute huge fixed-content reference documents.
In addition, the Sun StorageTek 5800 system provides search and retrieve functions through built-in intelligence. Its integrated Sun Fire x64 server and extensible metadata software give you unique advantages. For example, you can stop using file names. Instead, query your expandable, intuitive, metadata database using unique object IDs or using SQL-like queries against the metadata stored for each file (data object) stored. The user-definable metadata and search parameters allow you to organize, locate, and retrieve hundreds of millions of "objects."
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The Sun StorageTek 5800 system delivers the seamless scalability, data integrity, and advanced data management features that academic institutions need.
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"You can associate metadata with every digital object you store," said Art Pasquinelli, Sun Education Market Strategist.
Virtual views enable individual end user profile access. They can be used to simplify and speed up access to information, showing only views of the information that are relevant to that specific end user.
Purpose-Built Reliability
The Sun StorageTek 5800 system uses a symmetric, clustered architecture. All storage, control, data, and metadata path operations are distributed across the cluster to provide both reliability and performance scaling. Each node is independent of other nodes, and there's complete symmetry in both the hardware and software on each node. That way, you get higher accessibility and reliability.
In the event of a component failure, you can relax. The Sun StorageTek 5800 system all but eliminates system administrator intervention with reliable, self-healing functionality. If a component fails, the system recovers the object's functionality elsewhere, and there is no urgency to replace the component. Your new maintenance window could be at regular six-month intervals instead of weekly fire drills.
Cut the Stress and Cost of Archiving and Distribution
With traditional archive solutions, fixed data archives are vulnerable to corruption and data loss, especially in areas of bit rot and data integrity. The Sun StorageTek 5800 system provides a comprehensive defensive strategy that includes bit rot protection and real-time checksums. Reed-Solomon RAID 6 protection, advanced data placement algorithms, self-healing capability, and load-balanced scaling work together to protect your assets.
The system also scales dynamically without delays. Typically, capacity-only additions are disruptive, requiring you to balance data across NAS file systems or add to a SAN. The Sun StorageTek 5800 storage system gives you quick, easy horizontal scalability without any of that. Instead, you gain the advantage of being able to boost capacity, and at the same time boost compute power, memory, and performance to match. Scale in affordable increments — it's easier in a single integrated system. These features — combined with administrative efficiency, low sustaining cost for service and support, and low energy consumption — minimize total cost of ownership (TCO).
How about technology migrations? Even if you're moving major archives or just planning to "slosh" data, migrations are transparent to your users. Data placement algorithms and self-healing components let you maintain continuous access to data across moves.
Manage a Petabyte from One Screen
The Sun StorageTek 5800 system is driven by the Solaris OS and comes with a powerful management interface for monitoring and operating the system. You get an object archive client to manage object data, and cluster management provides a suite of services for communication between nodes. The High-Availability Database (HADB) searches for the system's metadata. Self-healing services look for problems and repair them. In fact, the entire system is equipped specifically to cut the need for administrative intervention and centralize its minimal management requirements.
Interested in exploiting your Sun StorageTek system to the fullest? Sun StorageTek service professionals can help pinpoint opportunities to reduce costs, mitigate business risk, and better leverage your information assets. Sun's consulting and managed services offer clear and simple solutions for regulatory concerns, complex storage growth, resource management, and scalability challenges. Covering 125 countries, Sun's dedicated storage service professionals can help you gain and sustain measurable results.
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Purdue University is using the Sun StorageTek 5800 system to develop its data library to handle the volumes of information generated by university researchers.
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Sun Helps Purdue University Manage 'Data Deluge'
One educational institution that's reaping the benefits of the Sun StorageTek 5800 system is Purdue University. Purdue Libraries is using the system to develop its data library to handle the volumes of information being generated by university researchers. Its efforts could become the wave of the future as researchers grapple with "the data deluge."
"We feel we're on the leading edge of something that is increasingly crucial — curating scientific data to make it easily discovered and accessible," said D. Scott Brandt, associate dean for research in the Purdue Libraries and interim head of Purdue's Distributed Data Curation Center, also known as D2C2. "The results of our research will allow scientists to concentrate on their projects while we help them determine how to best archive and preserve their data."
Purdue's digital data collections are not housed in a single building or a on a single server. Instead, they are part of what Brandt describes as a "distributed institutional repository." The data is stored in many places, including researchers' hard drives, departmental servers, and on the TeraGrid, a large-scale national computing grid.
But storing and retrieving data is an increasing problem for scientists as technologies speed the processes of research and create loads of information. To solve this issue, Purdue librarians will consult with scientists to examine data and produce metadata.
Michael Witt, Purdue interdisciplinary research librarian and an assistant professor of library science, sought corporate collaborators such as Sun to support his research in data repositories at the D2C2. The scientists with whom he has met are excited about the prospects.
"By sharing data, other scientists can validate your work," Witt said. "So it's just good science. Plus, some grant funding agencies are beginning to require researchers to archive and cite their data. There's also no point in reinventing the wheel. Once data has been created, it can be reused or repurposed by someone else in the same or another discipline."
Purdue Libraries and the D2C2 will use the Sun StorageTek 5800 system to prototype different methods of describing, preserving, and providing access to scientific datasets. The results of their research will be incorporated into the university's new data repository service, Purdue e-Data, which researchers and the general public will be able to see and search when it goes online in late fall 2007.
Purdue has implemented a Sun StorageTek 5800 system with a storage capacity of 32 terabytes. By comparison, it would take about 6,800 conventional DVDs to store as much information.
Sun Opens the Sun StorageTek 5800 System to OpenSolaris
Sun has begun the process of opening the technology behind the Sun StorageTek 5800 system top the open source to the community. The Sun StorageTek 5800 SDK 1.0 binaries are available for download at the Sun download center. This source code availability protects against lock-in and obsolescence.
Find out more about how OpenSolaris and other open source communities are sharing innovation and developing client and server implementations of the Sun StorageTek 5800 system.
Questions or comments? Please email education_news@sun.com
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