FOR RELEASE: May 25, 1999 CONTACT: Karen Adams Office of the Vice President for Information Technology 812-856-5596 kadams@indiana.edu

IU ANNOUNCES MAJOR AGREEMENT WITH IBM IN LEADING-EDGE INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES

Bloomington, IN — Indiana University and IBM today announced a far-reaching agreement to work together to upgrade IU's information technology infrastructure and collaborate on joint research projects. As part of the agreement, IU will make significant acquisitions of IBM hardware and software.

The agreement covers three areas identified in IU's recent IT Strategic Plan as critical to the university's future technology and research capabilities: massive data storage, supercomputing, and the platform for IU's new central information systems.

"This far-reaching agreement between IU and IBM will make a major contribution to our goal of leadership in information technology," said IU President Myles Brand. "We believe that the ability to manage and store information assets, whether for research or administration, as effectively and efficiently as possible, will be vital to the leading universities of the future, and IU's relationship with IBM will ensure that we lead in this crucial area."

"Universities are moving from business as usual to e-business," said Mark Elliott, general manager, Marketing, Engagement and Business Development, IBM Global Services. "IBM is looking forward to working with IU, one of the country's great research universities, to help it manage its information assets effectively for competitive advantage."

Central to this agreement is IU's massive data storage initiative. IU joins Los Alamos National Laboratory and other leading national laboratories, as well as an elite group of universities, in using High Performance Storage System (HPSS) and Distributed File System (DFS) software for data management. The HPSS software was developed by IBM and five U.S. Department of Energy laboratories. The DFS software was developed by Transarc Corp., a wholly-owned subsidiary of IBM.

The HPSS software will enable IU to expand its storage system to provide extensive capacity for IU researchers who need to store and access huge amounts of data. IU's Bloomington campus will be one of the first educational sites in the world where student users can access such a vast data resource from their personal computers, using a Web-based interface being developed by IU.

Additionally, the HPSS software will automate all of the magnetic tape-handling activities for IU's administrative systems, currently being done manually.

"The ability to store vast amounts of data will have an enormous effect on research at IU. No longer will researchers be hamstrung by not being able to store enough data in a readily accessible way," said Michael McRobbie, IU vice president for information technology and chief information officer. "This initiative will enable whole new research projects to be started in areas as diverse as data mining, astrophysics, high energy physics, and bioinformatics."

IU's massive data storage system will soon have 2 terabytes (2 million megabytes) of fast disk space and another 57 terabytes of storage space on tape. In comparison, the entire holdings of the IU Library, nearly 5.7 million volumes, would amount to about 1.5 terabytes of information.

IU will also become one of six universities that are members of the Internet2 Distributed Storage Initiative (DSI) in which IBM has a substantial involvement. As part of IU's involvement in DSI, IBM is locating additional massive storage infrastructure at IU's Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis campus. (See Editor's Note for additional technical detail on the Massive Data Storage Initiative.)

IU will use a Shared University Research (SUR) grant from IBM to extensively upgrade its IBM RS/6000 SP computer to true supercomputer levels of performance. The new supercomputer will support research in a variety of disciplines including astronomy, sociology, computer science and economics, and will allow IU faculty and IBM research and development teams to collaborate on a number of projects.

The IBM RS/6000 SP system uses the same technology behind the "Deep Blue" supercomputer that beat Gary Kasparov at chess. With this upgrade, the IU SP will become the most powerful supercomputer at any university in the state of Indiana and one of the most powerful in the region.

IU will use IBM RS/6000 systems as the main computing platform for its new student administration, human resources, financial, library and research systems to be developed over the next five years. The IBM servers will also support IU's new enterprise resource planning applications and other critical systems, including electronic commerce.

Indiana University is one of the oldest state universities in the Midwest and one of the largest universities in the United States, with more than 100,000 students, faculty, and staff on eight campuses. IU hosts the network operations center for Abilene, an Internet2 backbone network for research and education, announced by Vice President Al Gore in 1998. More recently, the National Science Foundation awarded the university a $10 million grant to develop the international high performance research and education network connection, TransPAC, between the United States and the Asia Pacific Rim.

IBM and RS/6000 are registered trademarks and High Performance Storage System and SP are trademarks of the International Business Machines Corp. in the United States, other countries, or both. All other company names or products are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.

EDITOR'S NOTES/TECHNICAL DETAIL

IU'S MASSIVE DATA STORAGE INITIATIVE: IU stands out among universities in its plan to manage all data, from the undergraduate student's homework assignment to the research scientist's largest and most valuable data file, with an integrated set of storage capabilities. IU will be the first to deploy a capability that links DFS and HPSS. This new capability converts DFS from a disk-only file system to a hierarchical storage system of disk and tape.

As DFS users fill the available disk space, files are migrated to tape under control of HPSS. The result is a file system of virtually infinite capacity, limited only by the size of the HPSS tape library.

A companion capability allows research scientists the benefits of high performance access to large files managed by HPSS, while making the same data visible as ordinary DFS files for ease of access by fellow researchers and general users. This capability is achieved by synchronizing the name spaces of HPSS and DFS for selected groups of files.

HPSS software was developed by IBM and five U.S. Department of Energy laboratories -- Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, Sandia, and Lawrence Berkeley. Cornell University and NASA's Langley Research Center also provided significant contributions to HPSS software development. DFS was developed by Transarc Corp., which is also collaborating on integrating HPSS and DFS.

IU's storage systems are built upon IBM Magstar 3494 Tape Libraries and IBM SSA disk, powered by new IBM RS/6000 SP computers and the university's existing mainframes.

IBM's Magstar Virtual File System (VFS) extends the integrated storage architecture to the university's information systems. VFS enables the university's existing mainframes to share the IBM 3494 Tape Libraries. Together, HPSS and VFS provide centralized management of the university's archives and active tape-resident files on an integrated set of robotic tape stores.