TrueNAS M-Series Open Storage systems have been successfully deployed to
capture data created by an advanced seismic monitoring system.
Measuring seismic activity on the City of Pasadena’s unused dark fiber
optic network, which was installed
30 years ago, will give the city and its citizens earthquake impact and
damage predictions for each neighborhood in the area with the goal of
improving public safety.
The seismic monitoring system, created and run by researchers at
Caltech, leverages 23 miles of unused fiber optic cable that circles
Pasadena, California. In the cable, there are hundreds of individual
fiber strands, many of which are unused or “Dark” and
made available for research use by the City. The research team
spearheading this work is led by assistant professor of geophysics
Zhongwen Zhan. Zhan is using the relatively new field of Digital
Acoustic Sensing (DAS) for this research. DAS uses laser pulses
submitted through fiber optics to sense underground activity.
Seismic waves passing through the soil cause the expansion and
contraction of the cable, changing the distance the light travels
between waypoints in the cable. The fluctuations in the distance the
light travels are analogous to thousands of seismometers for
more precise measurement of seismically created waves in the area. The
measurements collected by the University are equivalent to having data
from 30,000 seismometers, which is significant.
To store the resulting data, Caltech’s Seismological Laboratory has
several GPU-enabled servers which route the data through a 40GbE network
and into two high-capacity TrueNAS M40 storage systems from iXsystems.
With the TrueNAS M-Series line, users are capable
of expanding available capacity to more than 10 Petabytes which
provides exceptional scalability to meet research needs.
The TrueNAS M40 is an enterprise storage system built on an Open Source
foundation and file system (OpenZFS). The systems offer cost-effective
single or dual storage controller configurations and enterprise support
for 24×7 reliability. Each storage controller
combines multiple layers of high-speed memory to boost performance:
128GB of RAM, up to 3.2TB SSD-based read cache, and 16GB NVDIMM-based
write cache. In terms of throughput, the systems support 2x 40GbE (or 4x
10GbE) + 2x 10GBase-T interfaces per storage
controller, providing adequate performance headroom as data volumes
increase. With a future-proof 128-bit “scale up” file system, the M40
easily expands as needed, providing the ability to simply and
cost-effectively retain large volumes of research data.
Because the storage demands for this research are expected to be very
high and the work that will be done with the data very intensive, the
TrueNAS M40 was deployed. With the University’s work in this area
expected to grow significantly over the next year,
we are confident in the storage infrastructure that underpins this work
and allows the research team to expand their scope of work in 2021.
Fiber optic networks are currently in place throughout a large number of
cities and counties statewide. As a result, this opens the opportunity
for a significant expansion of research throughout a number of
municipalities in the area. This research has the
potential to significantly improve emergency preparedness through a
better understanding of the ground beneath us as vulnerabilities are
mapped and the areas predisposed to earthquake damage pinpointed.
“The TrueNAS M40 brings the power of High Availability (HA) ZFS storage
to Caltech’s IT backend, making it a robust data retention solution for
this application,” said Morgan Littlewood, SVP, Product Management and
Business Development. “Compared to the alternative
proprietary storage options, the budget-friendly TrueNAS M40 delivers a
full suite of data management features and resiliencies that ensure
there are no issues during operations.”
To learn more about how TrueNAS can help your organization, contact us via
https://www.truenas.com/contact-us/, or give us a call at 1-855-GREP-4-IX.
TrueNAS M40 Stores and Protects Data Used to Better Prepare, Educate, and Communicate the Potential for Earthquake Damage
