The project team selected the high-throughput switches to handle the storage I/O anticipated by researchers, who believe that 350GB of video will be processed during every 12-hour analytical run.

Cost-conscious approach

To achieve the desired performance requirements, 150-drive stripes will be created using the native virtualization capabilities of Bell's Z-SAN. Protection against data loss will be delivered through RAID 10 mirrors of the raw video data, transform data and metadata files.

"Our approach allows us to eliminate a lot of cost by using high-volume, commonly available systems," said Jeff Greenberg, senior director of product marketing at Irvine, Calif.-based Zetera Corp., the firm that's designing the SAN.

The project has been amassing several terabytes of audio and video data per week of early-childhood learning and socialization data to model human language acquisition, Roy said.