Penn State Research Center Shifts to Solid State Storage

A research computing center at Penn State University seeking to reduce backup time has upgraded its traditional hard disk storage to solid state drives with technology from Texas Memory Systems. Research Computing and Cyberinfrastructure, a unit of the university's IT Services organization, runs high performance computing systems and does software development and programming support for research, teaching, and other institutional purposes.

Each night the unit would hope that its use of 200 separate 15K RPM hard drives would be sufficient to handle backup operations and minimize the impact on production operations. Backups would take as long as six hours to complete; during backups other system operations would slow down.

In an effort to improve the backup process, the IT team for the research unit settled on the idea of using solid state drives (SSD) to handle the workload. After evaluating SSD products from four vendors, the team chose a pair of RamSan-810 storage systems from Texas Memory. These were placed in a high-availability mirrored configuration designed to exploit a replication functionality of the unit's IBM General Parallel File System storage.

The new implementation improved the nightly backup times by six--reducing a six-hour effort to a single hour. At the same time, the university said, the new setup improved input/output operations and minimized related power, cooling, and floor space costs.

"With some of the other solutions we tested, we poked and pried at them for weeks to get the performance where the vendors claimed it should be," said Michael Fenn, a Penn State systems administrator. "With the RamSan, we literally just turned it on and that's all the performance tuning we did... It seemed very stable and it just worked out of the box."

About the Author

Dian Schaffhauser is a former senior contributing editor for 1105 Media's education publications THE Journal, Campus Technology and Spaces4Learning.

Featured

  • interconnected cloud icons with glowing lines on a gradient blue backdrop

    Report: Cloud Certifications Bring Biggest Salary Payoff

    It pays to be conversant in cloud, according to a new study from Skillsoft The company's annual IT skills and salary survey report found that the top three certifications resulting in the highest payoffs salarywise are for skills in the cloud, specifically related to Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, and Nutanix.

  • AI-inspired background pattern with geometric shapes and fine lines in muted blue and gray on a dark background

    IBM Releases Granite 3.0 Family of Advanced AI Models

    IBM has introduced its most advanced family of AI models to date, Granite 3.0, at its annual TechXchange event. The new models were developed to provide a combination of performance, flexibility, and autonomy that outperforms or matches similarly sized models from leading providers on a range of benchmarks.

  • landscape photo with an AI rubber stamp on top

    California AI Watermarking Bill Garners OpenAI Support

    ChatGPT creator OpenAI is backing a California bill that would require tech companies to label AI-generated content in the form of a digital "watermark." The proposed legislation, known as the "California Digital Content Provenance Standards" (AB 3211), aims to ensure transparency in digital media by identifying content created through artificial intelligence. This requirement would apply to a broad range of AI-generated material, from harmless memes to deepfakes that could be used to spread misinformation about political candidates.

  • happy woman sitting in front of computer

    Delightful Progress: Kuali's Legacy of Community and Leadership

    CEO Joel Dehlin updates us on Kuali today, and how it has thrived as a software company that succeeds in the tech marketplace while maintaining the community values envisioned in higher education years ago.