Institutions and scientists worldwide rely on the facility's resources to conduct research. LONI has made a decisive move towards fault-tolerant, high-availability systems design to ensure near 24/7 functionality.

Concurrent with its graphics and computation systems, the laboratory uses a fault-tolerant storage area network (SAN) to accommodate current and projected storage requirements. The SAN hardware infrastructure is composed of :

• the cluster and supercomputers previously mentioned;
• RAID storage;
• dual robotic tape silos
• a full complement of Brocade fibre channel switches, delivering up to 800 megabytes per second data throughput.

Alternate paths exist throughout the fabric so that no single point of failure exists, guaranteeing access to critical data and processing power.  Two quad-processor 500MHz MIPS-R14000 processor SGI Origin300 servers mediate all data transactions and provide networking services.  A high availability application ties both servers together and ensures failover in the case of hardware failure. 

StorageTek SL 8500 and PowderHorn 9310
LONI relies on two silos, a Storagetek SL8500 and a Powderhorn 9310, to store mirrored copies of the facility's offline tape data.  These tape robots are housed in two different locations, ensuring that catastrophic events in any one data center will leave a copy of all tape data intact in another data center.  Seven high-speed 40-gigabyte and two high-capacity 400-gigabyte tape drives provide LONI's tape services.  To leverage the available SAN throughput, an SGI TP9500, TP9400 and a TP9100 RAID5 arrays as well as SUN 3510s provide nearly 50 terabytes of fault-tolerant disk storage.

NETWORKING

The LONI intranet consists of a switched 10baseT, 100baseT and 1000baseGigE ethernet as well as an IEEE 802.11a/b/g-compliant wireless network. The laboratory is connected to the vBNS backbone of Internet2 via redundant fiber optic 1000BaseGigE lines terminated on two independent routers.  While UCLA Campus Telecommunications Services (CTS) is responsible for the network and provides fault tolerance, network monitoring and load balancing, the redundant uplinks ensure that the facility's network connectivity will be maintained in the case of a single router failure.  The facility has a firewall providing network security.  Furthermore, LONI has implemented a virtual private network to facilitate access to internal resources by authorized users.  A virtual private network connection establishes an encrypted tunnel between client and server, ensuring that communications over the Internet is secure.