NEW YORK, 27 July 2007. Exanet, maker of software-based, clustered enterprise network attached storage (NAS) solutions, announced that NASA is expanding its storage capabilities with ExaStore – ICM. Exanet will be managing mission-critical data at the Dryden Flight Research Center, NASA's premier flight research and test organization.
Located at Edwards Air Force Base, Calif., in the western Mojave Desert, the Dryden Flight Research Center is NASA's center for aeronautical flight research and atmospheric flight operations. NASA Dryden is chartered to research, develop, verify, and transfer advanced aeronautics, space, and related technologies. It also serves as a facility to test and validate design concepts and systems used in the development and operation of the orbiters. Dryden needed a high-performance, highly scalable storage solution that could solve the unique challenges of its in-house projects.
NASA personnel decided to base its data management and mining activities on an Exanet cluster deployed on top of IBM hardware components. The cluster storage system is to handle the scientific data produced by projects, including Post-flight Retrieval of In-Flight Streamed Metadata (PRISM), Flight Card/Test Point Management System (TPMS), and in-house telemetry applications.
The solution enabled Dryden to solve business challenges that included a unique workflow for data management, high-speed capture data from various sources collecting real-time mission tests, and the ability to facilitate the NASA engineers with an easy way to collaborate for data analysis.
"We were looking for a cost-effective way to manage our mission-critical data in a simplified environment without sacrificing scalability, performance, or the high availability needs of our research team," says Jessica Lux-Baumann, NASA Flight Test Information Engineer. "Coupled with IBM servers and storage systems, Exanet gave us the single file system scalability that we needed while enabling our engineers with fast, easy access to shared test result data."
