The push for a SAN was hastened by Fuller's e-business initiative. Haupt said the SAN's ability to deliver high availability without dragging down the network let the company extend the SAN to its internal application servers as well. We realized the standards weren't there yet for the switches in the SAN, so we made a move toward Brocade because they positioned us best to take advantage of interoperability. That's not an insignificant consideration as Fuller juggles its different environments and tries to consolidate them. The particle accelerator at Fermilab in the Chicago suburbs takes proton and anti-protons, revs them up, then smashes them into each other.
Physicists examine the remains to learn more about atomic structure.
The next phase of experiments is slated to begin next month, with the collisions going at full throttle by March 2001. Particle beams will collide every 100 nanoseconds, and each collision will produce 200 kilobytes of data. We take 75 events per second of the collision products and put them on tape for storage and later analysis. Lammel said the department wants 20 to 30 terabytes of capacity in front of the storage subsystems for cache data on each disk, often for information associated with a particular application. Separately, Fermilab uses NAS for software development and analysis program assembly, but opted for the SAN approach for the static disks and read-only analysis part of the experiment.