A Houston-based energy company in a high-performance computing division needed a NAS (network attached storage) solution to serve data to its cluster as quickly as possible. The company focuses on performance, scalability, and cost because it processes massive amounts of data to help geologists locate oil reserves. To do this successfully, the company needed to move to a new platform due to performance issues and hardware cost concerns. Shortly after systems integrator Unique Digital, Inc. (Houston) installed the first phase of the project at a cost of $100,000, the customer chose to continue the project with the second phase, as well as implement additional products for future capacity needs.

The energy company's former off-the-shelf system was made up of Linux boxes serving up data from Fibre Channel JBOD (just a bunch of disks) over the network file system. With this system, the energy company was sending only 20 MB to 30 MB of data per second to its cluster per Linux box.

"If this customer needed an aggregated bandwidth of 1 GB per second, it would have to put 30 to 40 of these boxes together. Operating this way meant the company had massive amounts of hardware to manage and no centralized management," says Todd Belcher, systems engineer at Unique Digital. Further complicating the situation was the cost of the Fibre Channel drives. The company needed a system to reduce hardware and increase density and performance.

Evaluation Proves Profitable For Systems Integrator
After attending the SANStorm trade show, the energy company decided to evaluate the UNISTAR (Houston) NAS 2000 from Unique Digital. The NAS 2000 is a server appliance that offers 4 TB of storage in a NAS environment. After one week of testing and using the product in its own environment, the energy company decided to have Unique Digital install 10 UNISTAR NAS 2000 products in two phases.

After a week of testing, the installation of five NAS 2000s took only 20 minutes. When additional applications were tested during the second phase of the project, some obstacles arose for Unique Digital. "When we started installing the remaining five products, we started learning of some issues the product had operating in the energy company's environment. To overcome these problems, we had to make changes to the kernel. This made the testing-to-production phase longer," explains Belcher. Because major changes had to be made, this phase of the project took about two months.

Plans For Six More NAS Units
Each UNISTAR NAS 2000 has a capacity of 4 TB using 16 WD Caviar SE Serial ATA (advanced technology attachment) hard drives from Western Digital Corp. (Lake Forest, CA). The NAS 2000 is a UNIX-based system that uses NASMan (a NAS GUI [graphical user interface] that can be accessed via the Web). It supports up to a 2 TB file system and RAID (redundant array of independent disks) arrangement. Each NAS 2000 serves at a rate of 95 MB to 100 MB per second to the company's cluster, allowing more data to be processed with less hardware. It also allows users at the energy company to have multi-platform connectivity. Any computer platform (Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Solaris, Irix, etc.) can be used to access data via the company's Ethernet.

It took Unique Digital one day to train the company employees on the new system. Since the implementation, all 10 units operate to provide the energy company with 40 TB of storage capacity. Within the next year, Unique Digital will supply the company with six more NAS 2000s for future projects coming online.