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University of Washington: Page 4 of 5

"Isilon scales pretty much linearly and still uses one namespace. It does the equivalent of RAID 5 across their boxes... We're trying to get them to look at InfiniBand as a way to do clustering."

DigitalWell's front-end Web servers run Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) on six Dell Computer Corp. (Nasdaq: DELL) PowerEdge 1550 1U servers, which are load-balanced using proprietary DNS (Domain Name System) code.

While DigitalWell is currently based on Microsoft's Windows and SQL Server, McQueen says his group has tried to make its programming modules as generic as possible so that they can be ported to IBM's DB/2. "We might move to DB/2 just for scaleability, because of the parallel structure of DB/2. The way you scale Microsoft stuff is by adding a bigger SMP [symmetric multiprocessing] box."

In early 2003, UW plans to make DigitalWell available to all of the university's 25,000 students, offering each 1 Gbyte of storage space for media files. That, McQueen says, will be the real stress-test for the system and the point at which InfiniBand's advantages should start to become even more evident.

"If it's anything like the peer-to-peer stuff, they'll figure out how to use this," he says.