News

A Testimonial

03/03/10

Nirvana, a Division of General Atomics, last year refocused its Nirvana Storage Resource Broker (SRB) on the High Performance Computing (HPC) market. A thorough evaluation in the Data Intensive Computing Environment (DICE Program) test bed helped validate product capabilities and ultimately positioned the company for a $22.5 million Department of Defense (DoD) contract.

Greg Granello, Nirvana Market Development, said the DICE test bed evaluation was directly responsible for that $22.5 million success. He believes that not only did his General Atomics get immediate benefit from the evaluation, but other Federal agencies are closely observing the DoD implementation initiated with this independent test bed evaluation.

General Atomics had recently reemphasized the HPC market, and had participated in the DICE Alliance annual conference for several years when DICE was retained as an advisor on the DoD High Performance Computing Modernization Project (HPCMP).

“We knew DICE through Supercomputing and had participated in the DICE Alliance conferences,” said Granello. “We wanted a stronger presence in the HPC community and the HPC market and wanted to do what was necessary to improve our visibility.”

Nirvana SRB is well established where high-value static data management is key, including data systems for unmanned drones and image or sensor data, and General Atomics was confident it could serve DoD’s needs, but it needed to demonstrate the product’s viability in an HPC environment within DoD’s existing infrastructure. Key areas of concern to the DoD HPCMP Storage Initiative team were the ILM function across their HPC centers, and the security of the entire new architecture.

“Some were fine in theory but problematic in practice,” said Granello. “Demonstrating it on the test bed was valuable, which is very important with big, complex projects.”

Granello said one of General Atomics’ concerns was scalability for large HPC DoD sites, so DICE tested the functionality of Nirvana SRB and their partner’s hardware and software. The test bed was configured to test key elements of design and security.

“We did verify that the mix of products and solutions we were proposing would deliver the capabilities and function in the design,” said Granello.

The DICE Program was valuable during every step of the marketing process, according to Granello. General Atomics, Nirvana Division was first introduced to DoD in Ohio during the DICE Alliance conference in 2008. “The customer was at the DICE conference describing their plans and talking about how a complete solution didn’t yet exist,” said Granello. “They didn’t know at that point that we could do most of what they wanted. It provided the venue for me to talk to them directly and make that point, accelerating this opportunity.”

To see how the DICE Program can help your organization, visit www.diceprogram.org.