Duke Physics Department Crunches Data with JetStor RAID Arrays

Scientific research can produce huge volumes of data for analysis, a fact the Physics Department at Duke University knows well. Each of the department’s 12-plus research groups exploring nuclear physics, particle physics, and other exotic fields generates a terabyte of data every month.

To meet the storage challenge this data presented, the research groups used direct-attached storage. However, this approach limited storage to the size of each computer’s hard drive and impeded data sharing among researchers. It also barely kept pace with the intense data bursts generated by the groups’ experiments.

Read more below about how Duke’s Physics Department deployed high-speed JetStor RAID Arrays to absorb “bursty” data generation and enable the storing and sharing of large datasets.

JetStor® RAID Arrays Support Cutting-Edge Physics Research at Duke University

At the Duke University Physics Department in Durham, North Carolina, some 600 faculty, graduate students, postdocs, researchers, and visiting scholars work in such fields as nuclear physics, condensed matter physics, high-energy physics, photon physics, and quantum optics. The department has 1,500 computers and workstations in facilities like the new 280,000-square-foot French Family Science Center, which has laboratories for genomics, biological chemistry, materials science, nanoscience, physical biology, and bioinformatics.

By clustering ten JetStor RAID Arrays into an iSCSI storage area network (SAN), the Duke Physics Department gained a storage infrastructure that fully supports its ongoing scientific research. The theoretical nuclear physics group, for example, stores its experimental data on five JetStor platforms, and another group using high-speed cameras to investigate particle flows saves some 20,000 high-resolution images on JetStor solutions. Physicists working with national laboratories like Fermilab and Brookhaven deploy the devices to house large data sets locally to expedite analyses of research results.

“We built a robust SAN without the costs and complexities of Fibre Channel by using the iSCSI connectivity of the JetStors,” said Jimmy. “Because data is striped across multiple disks in each array, the JetStors offer the throughput demanded by even the very bursty data production of our lab work.”

The physics department also relies on the JetStor arrays to back up Linux servers and a Mac OS server that uses Apple’s Time Machine application to mirror data on Mac laptops. Administrators even use the JetStor systems to support the department’s website. “We can allocate storage to workgroups as needed and add capacity without disrupting the production environment,” added Jimmy. “Our JetStors also ensure no data is lost, which is vital because repeating experiments to reacquire lost data is expensive and time-consuming. Our physicists can now perform the most rigorous lab work with confidence that storage will never be a bottleneck or impediment.”

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