Web-based System Offers High Durability, Security, and Speed for Diverse User Base.
SDSC announced the launch of what was believed to be the largest academic-based cloud storage system in the U.S., specifically designed for researchers, students, academics, and industry users who required stable, secure, and cost-effective storage and sharing of digital information, including extremely large data sets. SDSC’s new Web-based system was 100% disk-based and interconnected by high-speed 10 gigabit Ethernet switching technology, providing extremely fast read and write performance. With an initial raw capacity of 5.5 petabytes — one petabyte equals one quadrillion bytes of storage capacity, or the equivalent about 250 billion pages of text — the SDSC Cloud had sustained read rates of eight-to-10 gigabytes (GB) per second expected to improve as more nodes and storage were added. That’s akin to reading all the contents of a 250GB laptop drive in less than 30 seconds. Moreover, the SDSC Cloud was scalable by orders of magnitude to hundreds of petabytes, with aggregate performance and capacity both scaling almost linearly with growth.