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Dana-Farber Cancer Institute Creates HPC Cluster with FlashDisk OpenSAN for Department of Biostatistics and Computational Biology

Burlington, MA. September 8, 2006 - Winchester Systems Inc., a leading data storage solutions company, today announced that Dana-Farber Cancer Institute's Department of Biostatistics and Computational Biology has built a high performance computing and storage infrastructure using their FlashDisk OpenSAN products.

Nikos George, director of scientific computing in the Department of Biostatistics and Computational Biology, was challenged to put together the best systems and storage infrastructure for the demands of their new, expanded mission and do it quickly at the best price. The new organization hired more researchers with the intent of ramping up operations fast. "The backbone would be a high performance computer cluster, a SAN and an Oracle RAC (real application cluster) database," says George. Fifty computer nodes would connect to the SAN, of which five would handle the Oracle RAC database and five would act as Web servers. For the SAN storage Dana Farber turned to FlashDisk OpenSAN with an FX-608e RAID head running 8 TB of storage in two enclosures each with 16 disk drives of 146 GB and 400 GB SATA disks on a Fibre Channel fabric connected via Q-logic switches. The solution is scalable for future needs, "We can scale simply by adding more drive shelves. We can also add another RAID head," says George. "We could double the number of 4 Gb/s connections if we ever needed more, although we are not yet near to saturating the link."

George confirms that the SAN from Winchester Systems is exceeding expectations, "We have been able to avoid the kind of performance hits that others had experienced, and the price is right," says George.

A customer testimonial story is available on the Winchester Systems web site with more details on the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute high performance computing application: www.winsys.com.

About Winchester Systems, Inc.
Winchester Systems provides network-attached storage, direct-attached storage, tiered-storage and storage area network enterprise data storage solutions. These solutions include high performance iSCSI, SCSI, SATA and Fibre Channel RAID disk arrays; tape backup devices and other high performance commercial and military grade data storage for mid-range servers including Windows, Windows Clusters, Linux, Linux Clusters, and UNIX. For more information visit Winchester Systems on the web at www.winsys.com.

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