14 DAY TRIAL // Cloud storage is getting more and more popular nowadays, and SDSC decided to establish one that, rather than aiming for wide support, is actually intended for just one branch of the IT industry, albeit a fairly large one.
The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) just announced that it had established a new cloud service, simply dubbed SDSC Cloud.
Aimed at academic and research use, it is described as the largest of its kind in the entire world and is said to be scalable by order of “ magnitude to hundreds of petabytes.”
The initial raw capacity is of 5.5 petabytes, which is accessible at sustained read speeds of 8 to 10 gigabytes per second.
The press release claims that this speed should scale alongside the capacity, indicating that SDSC is not going to pull any punches in trying to establish itself on the enterprise cloud market.
“The SDSC Cloud marks a paradigm shift in how we think about long-term storage,” said Richard Moore, SDSC's deputy director.
“We are shifting from the 'write once and read never' model of archival data, to one that says 'if you think your data is important, then it should be readily accessible and shared with the broader community.'”
Speaking of the community, the access to the system can be gained right away, as the signup process is already open. The starting rate is a fairly modest 100 GB, for the price of $3.25 (2.41 Euro).
“We believe that the SDSC Cloud may well revolutionize how data is preserved and shared among researchers, especially massive datasets that are becoming more prevalent in this new era of data-intensive research and computing,” said Michael Norman, director of SDSC.
“The SDSC Cloud goes a long way toward meeting federal data sharing requirements, since every data object has a unique URL and could be accessed over the Web.”