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NASA GETS LIFT-OFF!

From STORAGE Magazine Vol 7, Issue 6 - September 2007

Mission-critical data at the Dryden Flight Research Center, NASA's premier flight research and test organisation, is to be managed by Exanet software

Located at Edwards AFB, California, in the western Mojave Desert, the Dryden Flight Research Center is NASA's centre 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 development and operation of NASA orbiters.

Dryden needed a high-performance, highly scalable storage solution that could solve the unique challenges of its in-house projects. After evaluating solutions from several vendors, the organisation 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 Exanet 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."

Exanet CEO Rami Schwartz comments: "As Exanet continues to push the boundaries of network attached storage, it is rewarding that a world-class scientific institution like NASA should select our ExaStore - ICM software, becoming our 100th customer and marking a significant milestone. Our joint Exanet-IBM solution is proven to solve the most challenging data management needs and this deal underscores our leadership in the clustered NAS market." ST