The European Organization for Nuclear Reasearch, CERN, produces a massive amount of data to be analyzed, but also stored, a thing that’s becoming an increasing problem with the 2-3 petabytes of information it produces on a monthly basis. The Large Hadron Collider has generated over 100 petabytes of data to date, and all of it has to be kept safe and secure.
Seagate and CERN Openlab have now entered a 3-year partnership on the development of Seagate’s Kinetic Open Storage platform. The new platform restructures the traditional storage server architectures from the bottom up by connecting object-oriented applications directly to the storage device. This cuts out the many layers of hardware and software traditionally used and is something that is said to not only improve performance but also cut costs by 15-40%. It’s kind of a System in a Disk, to say it in the simplest of words.
“This is a thrilling opportunity for Seagate to collaborate with CERN to more efficiently operate one of the most extreme and demanding storage environments in the world,” said Scott Horn, vice president of marketing at Seagate. “We believe our partnership will not only deliver extensive benefits to CERN’s large-scale storage system, but also help us further enhance the Seagate Kinetic Open Storage platform by testing it in an unparalleled data creation environment.”
A second and future research project between Seagate and CERN is also planned where they will look at CERN’s EOS storage system to determine whether there are opportunities to enhance and improve the system.
Thanks to Seagate for providing us with this information
