For the Starfire Optical Range (SOR), a division of the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory's Directed Energy Directorate at Kirtland Air Force Base, near here, measuring the effect of that air turbulence is critical to a project that uses a telescope for sending and receiving laser beams.

To that end, the laboratory collects data from more than 20 different sensors at a rate of more than 1 Gbyte per second to adjust a mirror on the telescope about 8,000 times a second. That results in the world's fastest, most accurate adaptive optics, but the process creates a data storage headache that required the services of solution provider InfraStor Technologies, Princeton, N.J.

Previously, the SOR collected 650 Mbytes of data or less per night, allowing the data to be backed up to a single CD-ROM, said Terry Duncan, engineering director for the SOR. An increase in sensitivity led to the need to collect up to 500 Gbytes per day, he said.

In 1999, SOR contractor Boeing put out a bid for a storage integrator to set up a data-collection infrastructure. InfraStor was on the reseller list of DataCore Software, one of the vendors considered for the project. It won based on its technically sophisticated solution and low bid, said David MacRae, president of the solution provider.

By the fall of 2000, InfraStor built the SOR's first SAN with a primary storage capacity of 10 Tbytes and a back-up capacity of 118 Tbytes. Primary storage was done on arrays from Acton, Mass.-based Aviv, which in turn partners with Xyratex, a Havant, England-based company that builds arrays for a number of OEMs, MacRae said. The data was backed up to an Advanced Digital Information Corp. (ADIC) Scalar 1000 tape library with Sony AIT tape drives.

InfraStor used DataCore's SANsymphony for storage virtualization, Tivoli's SANergy software for file sharing, and software from OTG, a company subsequently purchased by Legato Systems, to handle the backups.

Everything worked fine until the amount of data collected exceeded the initial 10 Tbytes, Duncan said. The SOR expected a potential 30 Tbytes to 50 Tbytes of data, and originally thought it could delete unneeded data. "But then we found ways to keep it," he said.

MacRae said the excess data overwhelmed the OTG software's capabilities, so InfraStor implemented ADIC's StorNext Management Suite on an ADIC Scalar 10K using both AIT and LTO tape drives with a capacity of more than 250 Tbytes. "It was the first or second installation of a Scalar 10K and StorNext," he said.

At that time, the SOR decided to split the project into two parts and requested a second SAN for archiving and allowing access to the data by up to 50 workstations. This made for a complex system.

"It encompassed hardware and software elements never put together before," MacRae said. "If we tried to do that before 2000, there would be no way to do it without a sledgehammer and lots of servers with direct-attached storage."

Aside from the usual glitches associated with bleeding-edge technology, MacRae said the initial boot-up of the SAN was foiled by extension cords with barely enough power-carrying capacity to power up 12 arrays, each with two power supplies. "They all powered up the first time," he said. "Shortly thereafter, we got a . . . series of beeps which happened at the same time, so it sounded like a screech. It was the sound of 144 73-Gbyte hard drives parking at the same time."

The SOR may deploy a similar SAN for another telescope this year, said Duncan. He expects InfraStor to be a strong contender for the project, and also expects the new solution to cost less than the original because "the software works now."