EMC Corporation announced today that the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), one of the country`s largest supercomputing research institutions, has selected EMC`s Symmetrix 3700 Enterprise Storage system and advanced software solutions to provide consolidated storage, information sharing, and business continuity for its supercomputing, archiving, and virtual reality applications. "The software innovations we`re seeing out of EMC are very exciting," said Jeff Terstriep, NCSA`s Senior Technical Program Manager. "We`re dealing with three-dimensional visualizations of physical properties, such as storm modeling, a Big Bang galaxy formation, or star simulations. These computations can generate enormous amounts of data that need to be stored, protected and shared across different platforms." EMC`s Symmetrix Multihost Transfer Facility (SMTF) information sharing software was a major factor in NCSA`s selection of EMC. "EMC Symmetrix is perfect for sharing information across platforms because it supports multiple and various computer types simultaneously," commented Larry Smar, director of NCSA and the National Computational Science Alliance. "It used to take forever to extract data from the proprietary storage device attached to a supercomputer and send it over the network to the archiving systems. EMC`s Symmetrix and SMTF software enable us to directly connect both to the supercomputers and the archiving systems, bypassing the network bottleneck. That`s a huge advantage because it frees up our supercomputers to do what they do best." NCSA also has selected EMC TimeFinder business continuity software to create a rapid replication of data for archiving or visualization. "Again, this will preserve the supercomputing resources because TimeFinder can copy the data while our applications are running," noted Smar. "One thing EMC has learned, that the rest of the high tech industry has not, is that quality has to be scalable," Smar added. "EMC is setting new standards for quality by providing a stunning level of customer support to high-end computing. While a monthly crash on a low-end system might be adequate, the same quality control for a terabyte system obviously is not acceptable. At EMC, the systems undergo severe stress tests before they arrive at a customer`s site, which traditionally has been the customer`s responsibility to shake down." "We`re also extremely excited about the performance of Symmetrix, especially since we were concerned about any storage technology being able to keep up with the high-end computing that goes on at NCSA," noted Smar. "Symmetrix can scale up and run multiple applications at impressive speed." Located at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, NCSA uses a Symmetrix 3700 system to deliver high-performance consolidated storage to four SiliconGraphics Origin 64-processor supercomputers and one 128-processor supercomputer running computational, archiving and virtual reality applications. NCSA also plans to connect the Symmetrix system to its Hewlett-Packard Exemplar archiving systems. "EMC`s success as an enterprise storage platform in one of the world`s premier supercomputing institutions is further testimony to why EMC has become the industry standard for consolidated storage in high-performance environments around the world," said Robert Dutkowsky, EMC`s Executive Vice President of Markets and Channels. "EMC`s superior storage technology, combined with cutting-edge software solutions provide any organization with the capability to better manage and leverage their increasingly valuable information resources."
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