Dot Hill’s Storage Systems May Help Map the Universe

Dot Hill Systems , a provider of storage networking solutions, announced that its SANnet 4000 series storage system is being used for data analysis in conjunction with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), a U.S. Department of Energy national laboratory.

“As an astrophysicist, I was interested in increasing the efficiency of my science,” said Fermilab associate scientist, Jim Annis. “Because of the volume of data analyzed in this project, it is crucial to have the high-speed access by many processors (CPUs) that is provided by the combination of Linux, GFS and DMEP. This configuration has proven to be exceedingly stable, allowing me to use my time identifying clusters of galaxies and measuring the dark matter and dark energy content of the universe: to study cosmology rather than data management.”

For this data-intensive project, SANnet is used in a Linux environment with Sistina’s Global File System (GFS) and Device Memory Export Protocol (DMEP), which Dot Hill said it co-authored. According to the company, this storage configuration provides high-speed access to data gathered from digital images of the sky to build a catalog of clusters of galaxies, and ultimately a 3-D map of the universe.