Pawsey leverages Versity for Mass Storage

Pawsey needed to adopt a data management platform that would keep pace with exponentially increasing storage requirements for some of the world’s most data-intensive, big-science projects. One such project is the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA), a radio telescope located in outback Western Australia at Inyarrimanha Ilgari Bundara, the CSIRO Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory. Made from thousands of small antennas, the telescope collects immense amounts of radio data, which are used to examine the Universe in more detail than previously possible. MWA data are stored at Pawsey and accessed by astronomers through an online platform, the All-Sky Virtual Observatory. Through Pawsey, MWA researchers can download their observations, process data, and run simulations on the world-class supercomputing systems.

Using Versity’s Zero Data Migration feature, Pawsey was able to avoid a time-consuming and costly data migration and instead had a smooth and quick transition. Versity enabled Pawsey to maintain access to their existing data on tape without changing the format, while still making that data transparently available to researchers, scientists, and third-party tools. Versity delivered a high-performance S3 interface to tape, so Pawsey was able to still use tape as their large-scale on-premises cloud storage pool, yet using the Versity platform, they could quickly locate and access the data they needed. Versity’s mass data management software was easy to install and operate, further reducing the administrative burden for the Pawsey IT team. The solution’s seamless fit into centralized monitoring, reporting, and authentication services, along with effortless integrations into the existing 100GBE network, aligned with Pawsey’s desire to utilize standard procedures and methods.

Using Versity’s high performance and powerful capabilities to manage 150PBs of unstructured data, Pawsey was able to manage existing data and ingest huge amounts of new data while easily managing the massive Banksia data archive. The archive consists of two Spectra Logic TFinity Enterprise Tape Libraries with 34 tape drives and over 8,000 tapes. Through Versity’s full-featured, rich APIs, users and applications were able to interact with, manipulate, and capitalize on the data in the system. Data accessibility was finally possible through regular, standard interfaces and was available to plug into Pawsey’s data-driven workflows.