Global Industry Leaders Tackle Data Explosion With SGI Storage Solutions

SGI (NASDAQ: SGI), the trusted leader in technical computing, today announced that the company’s storage and archiving solutions continue to gain market momentum as more customers recognize the value of implementing multi-tiered storage strategies to deal with explosive data growth. With a range of integrated hardware and SGI® DMF™ software that can create and automatically manage tiered virtual storage environments, customers from media companies to genomics and university researchers are adopting SGI storage and active archiving solutions to significantly reduce equipment and operating costs while managing and monetizing their data-intensive workloads.

At the prestigious London-based Institute of Cancer Research (ICR), DMF software and other SGI storage products are used to provide immediate tiered data access for one of the world’s foremost independent cancer research organizations. With the active archive virtualized between two sites, five kilometers apart in London, DMF and other SGI storage tools provide researchers immediate access to online data archives for the high performance compute environments for next generation sequence applications and protein discovery network applications.

“SGI provides us with the complete tool-set required to support the diverse, high-end computational challenges faced by our institute,” said John Lockley, head of scientific computing at the Institute of Cancer Research.

What makes this and the other large data environments work is that SGI storage technology is designed specifically for real-world active archiving and simplified asset retrieval at any scale.

“Customers such as ICR are dealing with an explosion of data that creates serious challenges to cost effectively manage work flows,” said Jose Reinoso, vice president of storage engineering at SGI. “By leveraging the power of SGI storage solutions with features such as Parallel DMF, these researchers and scientists are able to focus on their primary mission and not struggle with data management issues.”

The power of these extremely large distributed systems is also available in an integrated solution with SGI® ArcFiniti™, a compact, fully integrated active archive solution. Mountain View, California-based Complete Genomics recently deployed ArcFiniti to manage one petabyte of data as next-generation sequencers are deployed and as resulting massive file sets are created.

“Easy, fast access to archival data is essential to provide top level service to our customers,” said Bruce Martin, senior vice president of development at Complete Genomics. “After comparing conventional disk arrays, tape libraries and cloud‐based offerings, this solution provided us with the lowest cost, highest performance and best ease of use. ArcFiniti was the best solution for our needs.”

Whether it is in genomics, weather forecasting, biosciences, or media and entertainment, the same tools can be brought to bear to enable some of the world's largest and most dynamic active archives to function more effectively and efficiently on a daily basis.

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© 2011 Silicon Graphics International Corp. All rights reserved. SGI, DMF and ArcFiniti are trademarks or registered trademarks of Silicon Graphics International Corp. or its subsidiaries in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks are property of their respective holders.