Seanodes’ SIS solution, Exanodes, ensures optimal availability and performance for the requirements of civil nuclear simulations.
Seanodes, inventor of the “Shared Internal Storage” concept, announced today that their SIS product, Exanodes, has been selected by the French Nuclear Agency (CEA) to improve – at low cost - both data access availability and performance on three of their departmental cluster which are used by over a hundred research engineers on a daily basis.
This department’s key research area is the analysis of hydraulic and thermo-hydraulic phenomena. The team’s main objective is to improve the safety and longevity of nuclear power plants through simulations, and incident & accident calculations. They are also currently carrying out in-depth research on next generation power plants and confidential military defense projects.
Within this department the data management and data storage questions had come to be of vital importance what with the sophistication of the simulation models used, and the increasing refinement of the calculations which inundate the data volumes with continual, rapid-growing results. The evolution of storage infrastructures had become inevitable in order to answer the three following ever-increasing needs:
Simplicity: the various clusters, designed initially as autonomous entities, were becoming both difficult to manage and impractical for users who need to run coupled multi-application calculations. High Level Performance: the arrival of new generation applications made the acquisition of high performance storage adapted to parallel applications an absolute must. Low Cost: the savings made by using Linux clusters should not be lost through the purchase of expensive storage solutions.
Exanodes was chosen for its capacity to answer these questions efficiently and cost effectively.
" One week’s evaluation of Exanodes allowed us to see that the cluster’s users were able to reunite simplicity of use with first class performance. Using the disks already present in the cluster, Exanodes represents a minor investment in comparison with the performance it allows you to obtain" explains Emmanuel Dorlet, IT Manager for CEA DEN/DM2S/SFME.
“The installation and deployment were carried out in under 2 days. This reassured us in our choice. Exanodes is simple to implement: the applications recognize the internal disks to be traditional NAS storage. Work habits don’t change and there are therefore no hidden costs associated with the espousal of this new technology” he adds.
“For Seanodes, this project equally allowed us to put into operation the recently signed technological partnership between Seanodes and Mandriva. At CEA, Exanodes was installed on the latest version of Mandriva’s OS” explains Frank Gana, Marketing Director of Seanodes.
“The confidence that CEA has shown in us further supports the pertinence of our concept and the quality of our products. It confirms, yet again, that in numerous contexts the use of internal disks coupled with Exanodes renders the costly acquisition or extension of storage infrastructures unnecessary” he adds.
Simple, effective and inexpensive, Exanodes is currently available - through our distribution partners - to customers operating in clusters, grids and enterprise environments running Linux.
About Seanodes
Seanodes was founded in late 2002, the result of several years’ research in the IRIT research center in Toulouse, France. Inventor of the Shared Internal Storage concept (SIS), Seanodes broke new ground with the introduction of its first product, Exanodes. Seanodes has received several awards since its creation (including 1st prize in the “5ème Concours National de Création d’Entreprises de Technologies Innovantes” which awards the most promising young innovative French start-up of the year) for its cutting edge patented technology and its ground breaking product – Exanodes.
