CERN recently reported the success of a significant milestone for scientific grid computing (see here): A continuous data flow of 600MByte/s on average over 10 days was sustained from CERN to five sites in Europe and two sites in the US.
This service challenge used 16 of the HP Integrity rx2600 servers in the CERN openlab setup.
All servers had an outgoing 1Gb/s connection which were aggregated into a 10Gb/s link to the external sites.The data was transferred from the local disks of the servers into the (disk-)storage systems at the external sites. This showed that the HP Integrity rx2600 servers can provide the performance as well as the stability needed by a data export system of this scale.

In the next stage of the service challenge, which will involve even more external sites, the data will come from CERNs storage management system CASTOR (including tapes) and will be stored at the external sites using their storage management system (also including tapes).

 

The openlab team