Keeping Tabs On Data

At Los Alamos National Laboratory in Northern New Mexico--known as Site Y when it famously launched the Manhattan Project during World War II--the amount of data produced hourly is mind-boggling. Thanks to equation-laden physics reports and dense biotech research findings, storage is measured in terabytes, one of which is equal to 8,000 times the amount of data that the human brain retains in a lifetime. Multiply that by 50, and that's the amount of data Los Alamos deals with at any given time.

So, not surprisingly, Los Alamos, which develops and applies science and technology to ensure the nation's security, faced a storage-management situation that required more than throwing more hardware at it. Like many other federal government agencies these days, Los Alamos turned to a solution provider to come up with storage-management software tools that could address its long-term needs.

STORAGE MANAGEMENT Solutions that keep data safe:
Solution	Customer Served
A solution from VeriStor that uses BakBone Software's NetVault suite to provide high-speed SAN capability with auto failover, direct-access restore, alternative filer restore and other features.	Los Alamos National Laboratory
SAN/iQ from LeftHand Networks running on clustered HP DL380 servers for intelligent distributed storage management	U.S. Army Fleet Support
A solution from DS3 that uses Asigra Televaulting to provide distributed data backup/recovery for remote offices, optimizing storage usage and WAn connectivity, while ensuring government compliance with oversight standards	National Oceanic and Atmosphere Administration
Veritas Storage Foundation for Windows from Symantec with Veritas Cluster Server and Volume Replicator provided by DLT Solutions	National security agencies (confidential)
LiveBackup from Atempo for continuous, automated data protection of files	U.S. Army Corps of Engineers

"Scientific applications rarely get smaller," says Ashby Lincoln, CEO of Duluth, Ga.-based VeriStor Systems, which took on the Los Alamos project.

The challenge faced by Los Alamos is a common one these days, both within the federal government channel and in private industry. As a result, the need for distributed storage-management solutions is rising sharply as research demands increase, new tools for transmitting data launch in the market and the federal government user becomes increasingly mobile.

Framingham, Mass.-based researcher IDC projects that worldwide sales of software storage-management solutions will grow to $2.34 billion by 2011, up from $803 million in 2006. The driving force behind the demand--which amounts to a nearly 24 percent compound annual growth rate--stems from the need for e-mail and file archiving to satisfy legal and business-compliance standards. But IDC also indicates that demand will rise significantly because of the need to effectively archive other forms of content, including file systems, desktop content and enterprise content-management applications.

For many of the same reasons, solution providers and vendors that target federal customers see similar growth in demand for distributed software storage-management solutions.

"The agencies we speak with are generally looking to do two things with respect to their storage infrastructure: Take costs out of the storage budget and make their people more efficient," says Sean Derrington, director of storage management at Symantec, a Cupertino, Calif.-based vendor that sells hardware-independent storage software products to both federal and commercial customers. Symantec is finding high demand for its Veritas Software Foundation software product, which satisfies storage needs through application clustering, multipathing, local and remote storage replication and other features, while allowing agencies the flexibility to use whichever server and storage hardware that's appropriate for them.

Symantec addresses the storage needs of a number of national security-level projects with Herndon, Va.-based DLT Solutions (2007 GovernmentVAR 100 No. 32).

"There are many buzzwords out there, like storage virtualization, data lifecycle management, data de-duplication, etc.," says Rick Marcotte, president and CEO of DLT. "With lifecycle management, customers are better determining the types of storage that data should be directed to, including tools to move data from higher-end storage to lower-end storage and, ultimately, archiving."

For Los Alamos, VeriStor needed to address the monster load of data that the laboratory had stored on eight storage filers of data. The system had grown too large to be backed up, and design bottlenecks emerged. Also, the system didn't allow for load balancing, so some parts of the system were idle while others were backed up with data.

VeriStor used a NetVault solution with BakBone Software to redesign the laboratory's storage network for the more than 10,000 employees, providing the capacity to handle 166 TB of data that runs up to 31 MBps. This was several times faster than the previous system allowed. It also provides for what's called "direct access restore" to quicken the backup process and, with a SAN virtualization solution, allows users to designate any one of 16 storage filers to increase flexibility, redundancy and failover capability.

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