Unisys Pitches Petabytes

Unisys Corp. (NYSE: UIS), a relatively minor player when it comes to storage networking, hopes to be first with a major breakthrough -- a storage system capable of housing over 1 petabyte (Pbyte) of online storage.

The vendor says that within three years, a government-funded project at the Cornell Theory Center (CTC) will produce a disk-based system that allows real-time access to over 1 million gigabytes (or 1,000 terabytes) of stored information. Funded in part by a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the work will eventually be extended for enterprise use.

The point here is to allow scientists access to massive amounts of data at one time in order to analyze it. Telescope images, for instance, could be analyzed with special algorithms to find pulsars in space.

"No one today has put together a petabyte of online storage," insists Peter Karnazes, director of high performance computing at Unisys. There are other projects afoot, such as the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN. Late last year, IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM) announced plans to develop a petabyte storage system for CERN, but at press time spokespeople at IBM had not responded to inquiries for an update.

The problem is one of cost, according to Karnazes and his colleague Michael Salsburg, technology director of the Systems and Technology group at Unisys. "You can have a petabyte of online storage, but it will cost $100 million," Karnazes says. "We want to do it for a tenth of that."By using SATA storage, the Unisys team aims to cut per-gigabyte storage costs from $50 to $75 (the typical cost of enterprise SCSI storage) to a range of $5 to $15.

The Unisys engineers have procured SATA drives from Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (Hitachi GST) and fitted them with RAID controllers from Rorke Data Inc. Each array has fifteen 400-Gbyte drives at present.

The Unisys servers are linked to the storage arrays via a 2-Gbit/s Fibre Channel connection powered by Brocade Communications Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: BRCD) switches and HBAs from Emulex Corp. (NYSE: ELX).

Besides the servers, Unisys is contributing the software that manages and configures the storage system. "We set up a framework," says Salsburg.

One thing: The Cornell setup will need to be tweaked for enterprise use, since SATA drives don't have the same reliability profile that SCSI drives do. Still, Salsburg and Karnazes are optimistic that reliability will still be high enough to make their solution acceptable to customers once it's fully developed.A representative from Cornell was not reachable before press time, but Salsburg and Karnazes say Unisys is the only vendor working with Cornell on the project. This doesn't mean they're the only vendor working on petabyte storage. Besides the IBM/CERN project, there have been a other efforts over the years, particularly associated with research labs.

The Cornell relationship appears to be feathering Unisys's cap. The vendor has participated in two other undertakings related to large database storage, including work with a radio telescope in Puerto Rico and digital rendering of visual effects for the Lord of the Rings movies.

Unisys plans to showcase the Cornell work at the SC2004 conference in Pittsburgh next week.

Mary Jander, Site Editor, Byte and Switch

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