CUG.Log

Communications and Data Management SIG Report


 

During the week, the Communications and Data Management SIG underwent some changes in its leadership. Kevin Wohlever gave up the group chair position to take over as Treasurer for CUG.

Robert Bell of CSIRO has stepped up to take over as group chair. Kevin Wohlever will assist as needed.

Robert Silva of NCSC stepped into the open position of Chair of the Mass Storage Systems Focus group. Paul Anderson of the DoD remained as the Networking Focus Chair.

Some discussion was held on the presentation ideas for the CUG/SUMMIT meeting in May 2002. If you have a suggestion for a topic or would like to present, please contact one of the group chairs listed above.

Talks of interest to CUG from this group included:

Session 3B (Monday, 21 May 2001):
Beata Sarnowska presented on the High Performance, High Capacity Resilient Mass Storage Server (RMSS) designed and implemented at the Naval Oceanographic Office DoD Major Shared Resource Center. Her talk started with a presentation of the requirements that needed to be met, hardware and software configurations, and the experiences encountered in moving from a DMF-based configuration to the RMSS using SAM-QFS. Owing to the interest created by her talk, a BOF was also held so that she could address in further detail questions the audience raised: in particular, the decision to go with the architecture they did and the comparison with other approaches.

John Badger of Cray then presented on the I/O direction for the SV2, Cray's next generation supercomputer. Their intent is to take advantage of commercial technology relative to the I/O and storage that will integrate well into the SV2 design. This, then, will allow them to concentrate more resources on developing the SV2 processing aspects.

Jay Blakeborough of Cray was next to present on the networking interfaces being worked on current Cray products. The main focus of Jay's talk with the work Cray has been doing relative to a Layer 7 Router (Cray L7R), which can provide an interface between Cray's HiPPI and Gigabit Ethernet. This investigation has been the result of several Cray customers asking about the viability of a Gigabit Ethernet connection into the Cray platforms. Jay's talk concentrated on what they have been doing relative to testing the performance on this router and enhancements made to increase the performance.

George Hyman - SGI
George discussed the current and future LAN technology for SGI, including Gigabit Ethernet, Myrinet, and cluster interconnect options. LAN options will be consolidating into Ethernet.

John Lynch - Aerojet: Large Scale, Highly Available Storage Area Network in a Real-Time Data Processing System
John gave an interesting talk about SAN usage at Aerojet with CXFS. He highlighted the reasons for looking at SANs and the potential benefits and pitfalls.

LaNet Merrill - SGI: SAN versus NAS versus Combination Products
LaNet presented on the benefits of SAN and NAS solutions. She discussed times when SANs should be used and times when NAS should be used. She also talked about when both should be used. She noted that with both solutions, security must be planned in. Security is not very strong with the current product options.

Must one choose between a SAN or NAS? Yes, but they can co-exist.

Use SAN for

  • Storage or server consolidation
  • Work Flow Management
  • Large I/Os or bandwidth applications
  • LAN-free backup

Use NAS for

  • Data movement between systems (could be SAN)
  • Access by UNIX, Linux, NT (could be SAN)
  • Small I/Os or transaction processing
  • Large number of clients

SAN/NAS device

  • NAS front end and SAN back end

Future

  • NAS systems with SAN back end will be more prevalent
  • Storage over IP, SANs on IP networks
  • Monitor iSCSI
  • FCIP, SoIP, iSCSI, IfiniBand and VI

Session 3B (Thursday, 24 May 2001):
Neil Bannister of SGI presented for all 3 parts of this session. The first half hour he discussed the status of Data Migration Facility (DMF) 3.0, its new features and related release information. The remaining time was spent discussing SGI's CXFS from an overview and current status to future plans. As always, there was plenty of discussion with Neil relative to SGI's overall storage plans and direction.

Kevin Wohlever
Ohio Supercomputer Center
kevin@osc.edu

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