Xenon Systems & Versity Deploy 150 PB Mass Storage System for the Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre
HOOD RIVER, Ore., October 14, 2022 (Newswire.com) - Versity Software, the leading global provider of mass storage and large archive solutions, announced today that the 150 PB mass storage solution for Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre in Perth, Australia, has been fully customized and deployed. This project is part of a five-year contract to implement a modernized data management system for Pawsey from the Australian HPC specialist, XENON.
This new storage system, called "Banksia" by Pawsey, is driven by Versity's next generation Scale Out Archive Manager (ScoutAM) platform. The system provides researchers with seamless access to archival data using the S3 protocol and automates complex workflows while enabling responsive metadata searches and queries.
Leveraging Versity's advanced technologies, the new system enables Pawsey to maintain production access to its entire historical data collection, even after its legacy storage system has been decommissioned. ScoutAM presents a global view of all metadata and access to all data without traditional time-consuming data migration.
"This system enables Pawsey to expand and modernize our essential data services for our astronomy research communities, while seamlessly transitioning to a new modular open-standard platform that can grow as our needs continue to evolve" said Mark Gray, Head of Scientific Platforms at Pawsey. "This provides an easy offramp from older proprietary systems and creates a foundation for more efficient data management in support of our scientific missions."
The Versity ScoutAM platform is deployed in a scale-out architecture to enable petabyte scale production workflows between a three-tier system comprised of existing HPC storage, a 60 PB object storage data lake, and the Banksia long-term mass storage infrastructure. In Banksia, ScoutAM manages a 5 PB high performance data cache, and two large tape libraries. All tape IO is parallelized across 68 tape drives with 74 PB in each library, with headroom for more storage over time.
"Versity's mission is to provide customers like Pawsey with a world-class hardware vendor-neutral data management platform to seamlessly orchestrate extremely resource intensive high speed data movement across any range of storage types at very large scale," said Bruce Gilpin, CEO and Co-Founder of Versity.
The planning, design, and overall project management of Banksia has been delivered by XENON who has supplied all components including racks with rear door heat exchangers, servers, network fabric and switches for fibre channel connections, and physical storage hardware. XENON Services set-up, pre-staged and thoroughly load tested the system in the XENON production facility in Melbourne, ensuring that when Banksia was delivered to Pawsey, everything was working and easily integrated into the Center's environment.
XENON has also provided documentation and training on Versity, and all aspects of managing the system. During commissioning and initial data in-place data migrations, XENON Services have managed the day-to-day operation of Banksia. These services continue after the handover of Banksia, with XENON providing ongoing support to ensure Banksia continues to operate at optimal efficiency for Pawsey.
"XENON has been integral to the successful delivery of Banksia, with the XENON team working closely with us and Versity to deliver a great storage system" said Stacy Tyson, Project Manager of the Technology Refresh at Pawsey.
About the Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre
The Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre is a world-class high-performance computing facility accelerating scientific discoveries for Australia's researchers. Named after Australian scientist Joseph Pawsey, known as one of the pioneers of Australian radio astronomy for his work in the field of interferometry, Pawsey serves over 1600 researchers achieving unprecedented results, in domains such as radio astronomy, energy and resources, engineering, bioinformatics and health sciences.
Pawsey is an unincorporated joint venture of CSIRO - Australia's national science agency - Curtin University, Edith Cowan University, Murdoch University and The University of Western Australia and it is supported by the Western Australia and the Australian government.
The Pawsey Technology Refresh project is supported by the Australian Government through a $70 million grant. Pawsey is also supported by the Australian Government under the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) through the Department of Education.
Pawsey Media Contact:
Karina Nunez
+61 430429120
pr@pawsey.org.au
About XENON
XENON Systems is a technical high-performance computing and complex data storage specialist headquartered in Melbourne Australia and delivering solutions across Australia, New Zealand, and South East Asia. XENON builds solutions to solve complex parallel compute problems and large-scale data management workflows, across both on-premises and cloud infrastructure.
XENON Systems has expertise deploying solutions for a range of industries with a focus on: Research, Defence, Government, Higher Education, Media and Entertainment, and the Cloud.
For more information visit www.xenon.com.au
XENON Media Contact:
Jon Tinberg, jont@xenon.com.au
About Versity
Versity is the leading global independent provider of scalable, modular, and efficient mass storage and large archive systems. Organizations leverage Versity's Scale Out Archive Manager (ScoutAM) to implement data preservation strategies for long-term storage, and retrieval of massive data stores, both on-premises and in the cloud. Versity currently manages over 1 Exabyte of archival storage across a global customer base including leading public and private entities in defense, financial services, education, research, aerospace, energy, entertainment, telecommunications, consumer technology, and publishing. Versity is a privately held company founded in 2011 and headquartered in Hood River, Oregon.
For more information visit www.versity.com
Versity Media Contact: Meghan McClelland, meghan@versity.com
Source: Versity Software, Inc.
