Officials at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC), a NASA facility at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif., sought technologies to upgrade their enterprise computer network. They selected Exanodes software from Seanodes, a maker of shared internal storage solutions in Boston, as part of the upgrade.

The upgraded enterprise network architecture will process and store massive amounts of spectroscopy and imaging data generated by the Palomar Transient Factory (PTF). The PTF is a four-year project intended to capture undiscovered objects by scanning the skies nightly.

IPAC, a multi-mission center of expertise for long-wavelength astrophysics, performs data-intensive processing tasks for NASA’s infrared and sub-millimeter astronomy programs by developing and maintaining systems, access/analysis tools, and data archiving, says a representative. For the PTF alone, in fact, personnel expect to process and extract images of up to 30 million objects captured each night, delivering viewable images to researchers by the following day. As a result, IPAC officials require high-speed disk storage able to accommodate extremely data-intensive demands and large-scale data growth.

IPAC engineers selected a multi-node Exanodes clustered solution from Seanodes for the PTF project. The high-performance storage platform with catastrophic fault tolerance is designed to deliver a seamless, performance-scalable architecture at a lower cost than a traditional single-controller SATA RAID array.

“Seanodes is the most-promising storage technology I’ve come across in years,” says Eugean Hacopians, senior systems engineer at IPAC. “I’ve found it to be a simple to deploy and manage architecture that is robust, highly resilient, and cost effective. To me, it represents the foundation of a new era of storage architecture–one in which storage systems exist independent of physical hardware and are much faster, much more flexible, and utterly fault tolerant. We are very excited about the independence and performance that the Seanodes approach will provide in deploying future upgrades and expanded data storage requirements.”

For more information, visit Seanodes online at www.seanodes.com.