Earlier this week we covered IBM’s partnership with the European ASTRON to develop analytics software that will filter the data collected by the Square Kilometer Array.  The initiative aims to make the job of the scientists who will be working with the telescope considerably easier, knowing that the instrument will generate roughly one Exabyte of space info per day.

All that data needs to be stored and analyzed on a physical infrastructure, and it looks like this is where DataDirect comes in – a few thousand miles south of Big Blue.  The company has been contracted by an equally redoubtable abbreviation, Australia’s ICRAR or the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research, to develop one segment of the massive system set to support the celestial project.

DDN’s trademarked Storage Fusion Architecture will be leveraged to process the data, an approach that reduces latency and increases accessibility by keeping everything closer to the CPU.

““DataDirect Networks is the recognized world leader in solutions for the type of massively scalable data-processing required for the incredible scale of the SKA telescope,” said Professor Andreas Wicenec, head of computing for ICRAR. “This project combines our expertise implementing and using in-storage processing of astronomical data based on commodity hardware with the most advanced HPC storage appliance supporting in-storage processing. With this combination we are very well prepared to design, develop and test solutions for the SKA data challenge.”

The Square Kilometer Array will fire up sometime in the next decade, but it will be built on technology from the current one. DDN’s in-storage processing has been around for a while, most recently embedded in one of the company’s newest products: the SFA10K-ME storage appliance, announced just last month.