Large-Scale Flexible Storage with SAN Technology Phil Andrews, Tom Sherwin, and Bryan Banister

The San Diego Supercomputer Center is installing a large (64-port) Fibre Channel Storage Area Network to form both an integral part of, and an alternative architecture to its existing traditional HSM system. Connected to the SAN will be a significant number (>10) Sun servers, a large amount of high-speed native FC disk (>7TB), high-end FC tape capability in the form of IBM 3590E and STK 9840 FC drives, and an IBM SP running the HPSS software. A portion of the FC disk will be cache disk for the High Performance Storage System andsome of the tape drives will also be utilized by HPSS. However, we will also be working with direct backups from the FC disk to the FC tape drives, administered by commercial file system packages such as Veritas and Legato. The initial configuration of the SAN will be as a FC arbitrated loop, but this will quickly become a full switch fabric. We will be experimenting with several transfer options within this configuration: 1) Direct HPSS transfers between cache disk and tape storage. 2) Transfers between FC disk and FC tape drives mediated by third-party software. 3) Transfers between HPSS FC disk cache and non-HPSS FC disk and tape storage. 4) Transfers to and from the outside world via Gigabit Ethernet connections. We will present transfer rates and other data on the success, or otherwise, of these operations. Much of the data stored in this system will be accessible via the Web and several largescale, high availability Web Servers will be running on the directly connected equipment. We will be attempting to establish this configuration as a workable model for making Petabyte-sized databases available for Web access in support of national-scale scientific experiments. In this respect we will provide latency and transfer rate results for Web access to the data. The SDSC already supports the world´s largest HPSS archive (>200TB) and numerous servers including the Protein Data Bank national resource.