Not only is Titan (a Cray XK7 machine with 17PFlops/s) the fastest
Supercomputer to date but soon it’ll have access to the fastest SAN
attached to it. With a net data speed of 1,4 TByte/s it can save a
private person’s video library faster then it needs for the click.

To give you a rough view of what 1,4TByte/s mean:

• Save 120 FullHD-Videofiles with each 120 minutes length in one second
• Save 120.000 MP3 files with 5 minutes length and 320 kbps quality
• Save 1 trillion documents with each 100 pages of text in one second
• Save 100 million pictures with 18 megapixels in one second
• Save with the speed of 2500 modern SSD SATA3 drives.

Impressive numbers already.

The capacity of the 97.2 million US$ DataDirect Network Spider II SAN upgrade is about 40 Petabytes and can hold the equivalent of a 365’000km tall book tower. The distance is about equivalent Earth to Moon. It will replace the “old” 10PB storage system whose speed is already a blazing fast 240GB/s.

Since the fight for the fastest Supercomputer is always active, it’s just a matter of time until Titan will face another Supercomputer, whose calculation power and/or SAN access is a tad faster.