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Storing CERN's Search for God (Particles)
Chris Lindquist writes "Think your storage headaches are big? When it goes live in 2008, CERN's ALICE experiment will use 500 optical fiber links to feed particle collision data to hundreds of PCs at a rate of 1GB/second, every second, for a month. 'During this one month, we need a huge disk buffer,' says Pierre Vande Vyvre, CERN's project leader for data acquisition. One might call that an understatement. CIO.com's story has more details about the project and the SAN tasked with catching the flood of data."
You may think of it as product placement, but I use it. I even provide the occasional blog entry on it on Advanced Topics. I sat through a RedHat performance tuning class that was quite excellent. But when they came to the part about ext3 and tuning it, well, let's face it - ext3 just isn't going to scale. I started with Veritas' Filesystem which is pretty nice. If you're a small-time admin, then you never get beyond a local, 4U disk array. Once your group spends more than US$2million on servers though, it's obvious what the problem is: Storage - The Final Frontier. SAN and clustered filesystems allow a level of scalability completely unheard of before.
They also completely left out anything but a tagline of their multi-tiered solution. I wish they'd talked more about how CERN supports 500Gbit per second aggregate throughput to their disks (at least they implied that). 50GB/sec (or so) is probably the toughest I/O problem you've ever dealt with, or will deal with for a long time. Whose RAID controllers did they use? Did they focus on speed (ASIC and ISL minimization), availability (redundant fabrics), or both? Did each node get dual 4Gb links or just one?
If this had been an advertisement, they would have discussed some 3.0 features like LAN clients.
So, in short, it's easy to say it sounds like an advertisement. Quite possibly, Quantum (formerly ADIC) coerced them into getting the piece written. But if this had been an advertisement, there is so much more that is going on under the hood that would have been said. Large, fast, distributed filesystems are non-trivial and take an extreme amount of engineering and testing. StorNext really is good at what they claim to do.
If you want to read about some of the drawbacks though, I yak about them on my blog. Sorry for the plug.