Hardware Purchase - High-performance Storage
ITaP offering Purdue researchers fast, reliable, secure data storage
ITaP’s Rosen Center for Advanced Computing (RCAC) is now offering no-hassle data storage in the same way the center’s community cluster program helps faculty members do research using high-performance computing without having to worry about running a computer system.
Faculty can now purchase trays of highly reliable, high-performance scratch disk space for research use through the Rosen Center. Participants purchase disk media. RCAC provides the infrastructure, five years warranty support and systems administration.
Storage is available in units of one disk tray. Each tray holds 7.5 terabytes (TB) of usable storage. The current price of each tray is $18,535. The trays are configured with a hot spare disk and connected to an RCAC-supplied RAID controller, a redundant disk array that offers speed and data integrity advantages.
The storage is served to Rosen Center computer systems using a high-performance server cluster made up of redundant pairs of BlueArc Titan servers connected directly to the RCAC research network via redundant network links with a total bandwidth of 40 gigabits per second (GB/s). That makes for fast access when data is needed for research computations. On-campus access also is available via standard desktop file sharing protocols.
The end result is enterprise-quality storage—with higher reliability than off-the-shelf commodity disks—operated for participants by RCAC expert staff and at a competitive price.
For more information about storage options, please contact RCAC at rcac-cluster-purchase@lists.purdue.edu. To purchase scratch storage, please use the online order form here.