SGI Triples Backup and Restore Record
SGI has achieved a 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 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 benchmarks were established in a collaboration between SGI, LEGATO, Brocade, LSI Logic Storage Systems and StorageTek 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 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).
An SGI Origin 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 Performance 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.
