DDN Storage Assists TRIUMF

SANTA CLARA, Calif., March 24 — TRIUMF, one of the world’s leading subatomic physics laboratories and Canada’s national laboratory, is using DDN Storage SFA high-performance engine in combination with dCache, a global data distribution service, to help 3,000 scientists at 177 institutions across 38 countries collaborate on major scientific discoveries as part of the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). As an ATLAS Tier-1 data centre, TRIUMF stores, processes and distributes around the clock massive amounts of data generated by the experiment. Located at CERN, the European organization for nuclear research, the ATLAS experiment played a major role in the most important particle physics breakthrough to date—the discovery of the Higgs boson, a fundamental ingredient to the building blocks that constitute our universe.

With storage performance a critical requirement especially at petabytes level, TRIUMF sought a powerful storage system with industry-leading density, reliability and efficiency that would significantly speed up data storage and processing. The organization also wanted to increase global collaboration by enabling seamless sending and receiving of large files with other ATLAS sites.

Using DDN SFA 12KXE with embedded dCache, TRIUMF consolidated both storage and data distribution within a converged architecture to deliver unlimited and seamless data access and sharing between nine other Tier-1 and 70 Tier-2 sites while minimizing access latency.

Thanks to DDN’s industry-leading density, running TRIUMF’s storage infrastructure now costs significantly less than before; the organization went from 21 4U servers requiring multiple racks to one DDN SFA system with 1.6 PBs running eight dCache virtual nodes in half a rack. Significant savings in data center space, power and cooling costs also have been realized.

DDN Streamlines Scientific Data Distribution to Increase Global Research Collaboration

DDN’s In-Storage Processing feature enabled TRIUMF to embed dCache within the storage controller, consolidating both its storage processing and data distribution requirements in one system, with simple, single pane of glass management.

DDN enables TRIUMF to handle the highest levels of intensive data processing and simulations in support of the biggest experiment of the century.

DDN’s scalable, high-capacity storage was ideally suited for accommodating TRIUMF’s aggressive storage growth, which expanded by at least one order of magnitude at each refresh cycle.

In addition to proven data resiliency, sophisticated DDN capabilities, including DirectProtect and Data-At-Rest Encryption, enabled TRIUMF to meet extremely stringent availability requirements.