NNSA

With a mission focused on enhancing national security through the military application of nuclear science, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) was established by Congress in 2000 as a semi-autonomous agency within the U.S. Department of Energy.

NNSA has a broad range of responsibilities that include maintaining the safety, security, and effectiveness of the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile without conducting nuclear tests; reducing the proliferation of nuclear weapons and materials; providing the U.S. Navy with safe and effective nuclear propulsion; and providing capabilities for responding to nuclear counter-terrorism and other related incidents.

Including three national laboratories, the ability to securely share information among the organization’s scientists, engineers, security experts and program managers is paramount to enabling NNSA to meet the objectives of its four mission areas.
However, when it came to the ability to access and update shared project files including Word, Excel, presentations and graphics files, users were reporting that email, FTP, shared folders and other available techniques to support this activity were not optimal. They needed file sharing infrastructure that would provide local users with fast access without degrading the performance of their Wide Area Network (WAN) when large files were being updated and replicated from site-to-site.

Looking ahead, they also wanted a solution that utilized version management to ensure file integrity, as multiple users could be updating and saving the same files while at different locations.

Since NetApp supplied high performance storage systems that NNSA recently implemented, the NNSA team naturally reached out to them to see if they had an available solution. After some initial research, the consulting NetApp engineer recommended PeerLink, a file sharing and collaboration solution from Peer Software.

Based on DFSR+® technology, PeerLink provides distributed file service capabilities such as real-time sync for maintaining file replicas at multiple locations, and utilizes byte-level replication to minimize the performance impact on WAN connections. PeerLink also incorporates distributed file locking to maintain file integrity, and was fully compatible with the NetApp storage systems implemented by NNSA.