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SGI triples backup and restore record, scalable technology protects large data environments

Announcement posted by SGI Australia 23 Jul 2003

Company collaborates with Brocade, LEGATO, LSI Logic Storage Systems and StorageTek to successfully complete benchmark
SGI (NYSE: SGI) announced today that it has achieved an unprecedented benchmark, sustaining a rate of 10.1TB per hour for a disk-to-tape file backup. SGI has also established an image restore record of 7.9TB/hour. The benchmark nearly triples the previous record of 3.6TB per hour for backup and is more than three times faster than the previous restore record of 2.2TB per hour.
This achievement significantly raises the standard for high-performance, scalable storage solutions designed to protect large data environments. The industry-wide demand to reduce the time allocation and workflow disruption when backing up and/or restoring critical data includes military and civilian agencies supplying real-time weather data and forecasts. Similarly, the scientific community must protect large amounts of data such as current and historic brain-image files to study brain structure, aid in brain surgery, and cure disease. In the entertainment field movie studios are working 200+ TB (20 million files) of film resolution data.
These groundbreaking benchmarks were established in a collaboration between SGI, LEGATO (Nasdaq: LGTO), Brocade (Nasdaq: BRCD), LSI Logic Storage Systems (NYSE: LSI) and StorageTek (NYSE: STK) and established several new performance standards for storage technology. Those new standards include:
File-level backup: sustained rate of 10.1TBs per hour
File-level restore: sustained rate of 4.5TBs per hour
Image-level backup: sustained rate of 7.2TBs per hour
Image-level restore: sustained rate of 7.9TBs per hour
Backup of 1TB at file-level (in minutes): 7:09
Restore of 1TB at file level (in minutes): 15:29
Single 10TB XFS filesystem
File-level backup: sustained rate of 6.26TBs per hour
File-level restore: sustained rate of 4.43TBs per hour
"Data centers will continue to experience high storage growth rates over the next five years," said Steve Kenniston, analyst at Enterprise Storage Group. "As application demands cause backup windows to disappear and downtime costs increase focus on recovery, large computing environments face relentless pressure to achieve faster backup and restore performance. These are significant milestones in meeting this challenge."
The test was conducted on StorageTek's Louisville, Colo. campus with commercially available systems and storage hardware and software in a storage area network (SAN) environment. It used real-world data from GFDL. The Princeton, N.J.-based science center's massive store of complex data offered an ideal opportunity to show how the complement of technology offered by the participating storage management companies can readily address the need to back up and recover massive amounts of data in far less time.
"What was proved here today is that with the proper tools we are able to back up and restore a large amounts of data, ensuring less disruption and increased protection of critical information," said Brian Gross, physical scientist, Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL).
Technical Configuration of the Benchmark Test
An SGI OriginTM 3000 server with SGI storage software technology was the platform for the backup and restore operation and had to sustain nearly 6GB per second of aggregate I/O throughput to achieve these world-record results. The Origin server was equipped with 32 MIPS processors and eight I/O modules. An SGI Total PerformanceTM 9500 (SGI TP9500) high-performance RAID array configured with over 17TB of Fibre Channel disk capacity was used to store 10.297TB of customer data, composed of files ranging from 2 GB to 42GB. The SGI TP9500 system is based on technology developed by LSI Logic Storage Systems, Inc., and sustained close to 3GB-per-second throughput during the backup. A StorageTek PowderHorn 9310 tape library utilizing 48 StorageTek T9940B tape drives was used to backup and restore the 10TBs of data. The SGI Origin server, SGI TP9500 RAID array and StorageTek T9940B tape drives were all connected in a 2Gb fibre channel SAN using a combination of Brocade SilkWorm 3900, SilkWorm 3800 and SilkWorm 3200 fabric switches.
LEGATO Systems, Inc.'s industry-leading data protection software, NetWorkerTM, was hosted on the SGI Origin server to manage backup and restore operations. World-record performance was achieved for all four benchmark parameters using LEGATO's new NetWorkerTM 7.0 release.
"These tests help us understand real-world performance in a most demanding customer environment which in turn allows us to develop data protection solutions for a broad range of customer scenarios," said Gabriel Broner, senior vice president and general manger, Software and Storage Administration, SGI. "This exercise affirms that we are several steps ahead of current offerings with unmatched capability and performance levels. And we will certainly continue to push these limits."
About SGI
SGI, also known as Silicon Graphics, Inc., is the world's leader in high-performance computing, visualization and storage. SGI's vision is to provide technology that enables the most significant scientific and creative breakthroughs of the 21st century. Whether it's sharing images to aid in brain surgery, finding oil more efficiently, studying global climate or enabling the transition from analog to digital broadcasting, SGI is dedicated to addressing the next class of challenges for scientific, engineering and creative users. SGI was named on FORTUNE magazine's 2003 list of "Top 100 Companies to Work For." With offices worldwide, the company is headquartered in Mountain View, Calif., and can be found on the Web at www.sgi.com.
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