DataDirect Networks Case Studies ACCELERATE: NATIONAL LABORATORIES DDN and SGI Deliver Advanced Image Acquisition, Storage, Retrieval, and Processing Enabling Real-Time Intelligence on the Battlefi eld in the Naval Research Laboratory’s Large Data Joint Capabilities Technology Demonstration

Edit This Case Study Record

	ACCELERATE: NATIONAL LABORATORIES DDN and SGI Deliver Advanced Image Acquisition, Storage, Retrieval, and Processing Enabling Real-Time Intelligence on the Battlefi eld in the Naval Research Laboratory’s Large Data Joint Capabilities Technology Demonstration DataDirect Networks

ACCELERATE: NATIONAL LABORATORIES DDN and SGI Deliver Advanced Image Acquisition, Storage, Retrieval, and Processing Enabling Real-Time Intelligence on the Battlefi eld in the Naval Research Laboratory’s Large Data Joint Capabilities Technology Demonstration

DataDirect Networks

Technology Category	Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Storage Services Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Hybrid Cloud
Applicable Industries	National Security & Defense
Applicable Functions	Discrete Manufacturing Logistics & Transportation
Use Cases	Autonomous Robots Track & Trace of Assets Vehicle Telematics
Services	Hardware Design & Engineering Services System Integration
Challenge	The military has been using satellite, manned airborne, and Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) photography to gain insight into the battlefield. However, the challenge lies in obtaining rapid access to the information being collected, sharing it among analysts, planners, and decision makers, and using it to provide a decisive advantage. As sensors increase in numbers and analysis is performed in multiple spectrums, the amount of data being generated has grown tremendously, requiring new technologies to retrieve, store, move, and make sense of it. The Large Data Joint Capability Technology Demonstration (Large Data JCTD) project at NRL is designed to meet this challenge. The project requires handling massively large data files and total data sets. Even in trials, the data would reach nearly a Petabyte per site and require ingest and output rates exceeding 3GB/s. As data is acquired, it may need to be automatically replicated between each Large Data JCTD site. At the data rates required by the project, this presented challenges in both WAN transport and encryption technologies. Read More
About Customer	The Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) is the corporate research laboratory for the United States Navy and the United States Marine Corps. It conducts a wide range of basic scientific research, applied research, technological development and prototyping. A few of the laboratory's current specialties include plasma physics, space physics, materials science, and tactical electronic warfare. NRL is one of the first US Government scientific R&D laboratories, having opened in 1923 at the instigation of Thomas Edison, and is currently under the Office of Naval Research. NRL's research expenditures are approximately $1.1 billion per year. Read More
Solution	The storage challenge of Large Data JCTD was met by DDN. The company’s storage systems were purpose built for speed and scalability and have been deployed in the world’s leading supercomputing sites, where bandwidth and massive data storage are the norm. DDN supplied high-performance storage system appliances to each Large Data JCTD site, managing disk arrays that are scalable to nearly a Petabyte each in a dense footprint using only two data center racks. The DDN high-performance storage system solution is unique because it can handle the rapid data ingest rates of today’s sensors, while scaling to allow for future growth in bandwidth and capacity as sensors improve. SGI provided Large Data JCTD with an array of Infiniband-connected SGI shared memory systems as well as its CXFS high performance clustered file system. The SGI compute nodes provide all image processing, data management, and automated indexing functions. Infiniband provides a single wire solution for the computing, storage, and communications networks. DataDirect Networks and SGI worked together to integrate their respective systems with WAN encryption and replication technology supplied by additional vendors. Read More Log in to view content
Contents

Technology Category

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Storage Services

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Hybrid Cloud

Applicable Industries

National Security & Defense

Applicable Functions

Discrete Manufacturing

Logistics & Transportation

Use Cases

Autonomous Robots

Track & Trace of Assets

Vehicle Telematics

Services

Hardware Design & Engineering Services

System Integration

Challenge

The military has been using satellite, manned airborne, and Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) photography to gain insight into the battlefield. However, the challenge lies in obtaining rapid access to the information being collected, sharing it among analysts, planners, and decision makers, and using it to provide a decisive advantage. As sensors increase in numbers and analysis is performed in multiple spectrums, the amount of data being generated has grown tremendously, requiring new technologies to retrieve, store, move, and make sense of it. The Large Data Joint Capability Technology Demonstration (Large Data JCTD) project at NRL is designed to meet this challenge. The project requires handling massively large data files and total data sets. Even in trials, the data would reach nearly a Petabyte per site and require ingest and output rates exceeding 3GB/s. As data is acquired, it may need to be automatically replicated between each Large Data JCTD site. At the data rates required by the project, this presented challenges in both WAN transport and encryption technologies.

About Customer

The Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) is the corporate research laboratory for the United States Navy and the United States Marine Corps. It conducts a wide range of basic scientific research, applied research, technological development and prototyping. A few of the laboratory's current specialties include plasma physics, space physics, materials science, and tactical electronic warfare. NRL is one of the first US Government scientific R&D laboratories, having opened in 1923 at the instigation of Thomas Edison, and is currently under the Office of Naval Research. NRL's research expenditures are approximately $1.1 billion per year.

Solution

The storage challenge of Large Data JCTD was met by DDN. The company’s storage systems were purpose built for speed and scalability and have been deployed in the world’s leading supercomputing sites, where bandwidth and massive data storage are the norm. DDN supplied high-performance storage system appliances to each Large Data JCTD site, managing disk arrays that are scalable to nearly a Petabyte each in a dense footprint using only two data center racks. The DDN high-performance storage system solution is unique because it can handle the rapid data ingest rates of today’s sensors, while scaling to allow for future growth in bandwidth and capacity as sensors improve. SGI provided Large Data JCTD with an array of Infiniband-connected SGI shared memory systems as well as its CXFS high performance clustered file system. The SGI compute nodes provide all image processing, data management, and automated indexing functions. Infiniband provides a single wire solution for the computing, storage, and communications networks. DataDirect Networks and SGI worked together to integrate their respective systems with WAN encryption and replication technology supplied by additional vendors.

Impact #1	Unified, high performance infrastructure that delivers actionable intelligence in real-time
Impact #2	Scalable, cost-effective solution that supports data growth over the lives of many missions
Impact #3	The DDN storage solution handles the rapid data ingest rates of today’s sensors, while scaling to allow for future growth in bandwidth and capacity as sensors improve.

Impact #1

Unified, high performance infrastructure that delivers actionable intelligence in real-time

Impact #2

Scalable, cost-effective solution that supports data growth over the lives of many missions

Impact #3

The DDN storage solution handles the rapid data ingest rates of today’s sensors, while scaling to allow for future growth in bandwidth and capacity as sensors improve.

Benefit #1	Data center at rates that can exceed one Terabyte per hour per sensor
Benefit #2	Individual file sizes grow to hundreds of gigabytes
Benefit #3	Data to ingest, store, process, and share can easily grow into Petabytes (1,000 Terabytes) or even Exabytes (1,000,000 Terabytes)

Benefit #1

Data center at rates that can exceed one Terabyte per hour per sensor

Benefit #2

Individual file sizes grow to hundreds of gigabytes

Benefit #3

Data to ingest, store, process, and share can easily grow into Petabytes (1,000 Terabytes) or even Exabytes (1,000,000 Terabytes)

Download PDF Version

Overview

ACCELERATE: NATIONAL LABORATORIES DDN and SGI Deliver Advanced Image Acquisition, Storage, Retrieval, and Processing Enabling Real-Time Intelligence on the Battlefi eld in the Naval Research Laboratory’s Large Data Joint Capabilities Technology Demonstration

Operational Impact

Quantitative Benefit