The Station just came across a storage company called General Atomics. And you thought all the good names for IT companies were taken.

In any case, the San Diego, Calif.-based company received some good news Sept. 30: It has been awarded a $22.5 million, multiyear, multisite project by the High Performance Computing Modernization Program Office of the U.S. Department of Defense.

Didn't know there was an office that specifically handles HPC modernization programs for the DoD? Can't say you don't learn something new and important with every entry in this blog.

The new contract calls for the implementation and operation of a storage lifecycle management system to span three armed services [Air Force, Army and Navy] and six DoD supercomputing resource centers. Off the top, the deployment will have 29 petabytes of data under management -- including capacity dedicated to disaster recovery.

That's a lot of content, defense-oriented or not. The sites covered will include the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson AFB in Ohio [yes, that's where all the top-secret UFO data is supposedly kept]; Arctic Region Supercomputing Center in Fairbanks, Alaska; U.S. Army Research Laboratory in Aberdeen Proving Ground, Md.; U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center in Vicksburg, Miss.; Navy DoD Supercomputing Resource Center at the Stennis Space Center, Miss.; and Maui High Performance Computing Center in Kihei, Maui, Hawaii.

General Atomics will provide server hardware, Oracle-based Metadata catalogs, Nirvana SRB federating and ILM [information lifecycle management] software, Sun SAM-QFS hierarchical storage management software, training, support and implementation services.

General Atomics' supporting partners in the deal are Sun Microsystems Federal of McLean, Va.; Computer Sciences Corp. and its HPC Center of Excellence in Dayton; and Cipher Solutions of Raleigh, N.C.