The challenge
The Department of Plant Biotechnology and Bioinformatics at Ghent University needed a modern and agile storage solution for storing and protecting the critical data from its research. Much of the research it conducts is simulation‑based, and this research must withstand the test of time. Losing important research would be a major blow to the department’s efforts. As a result, the department needed a centralized multiprotocol data storage system for extremely secure archiving of simulation data. This solution also needed to support NFS file services connected to the simulation servers.
New research can result in large amounts of data accumulating quickly, and the research team doesn’t have time to spend upgrading hardware or subscriptions to gain access to more space. This is why ease of scalability would make their work so much easier.
The solution
When STORViX demonstrated that AiRE could easily scale from a few terabytes of storage to petabytes in a few seconds without having to wait for a RAID rebuild operation, there was no doubt in the minds of the department’s research team that this was just the agile storage solution they needed.
AiRE IntelligentFiler model 3122 was connected directly to the simulation servers to quickly and easily store the department’s critical simulation data. As the heart of IntelligentFiler, AiRE has powerful features that serve as the lifeblood of the full AiRE IntelligentFiler solution. These features provide continuous protection from corruption, disasters, and breaches, while optimal performance is always ensured by automating I/O path management, application profile recognition and data reduction.
Having a unified storage system was the perfect solution in terms of agility. This enabled the research team to quickly and easily use the system so they could spend more time conducting research, which is what they do best. In fact, one of the benefits most appreciated by the department was how easy the system was to install and use. With our agile storage, AiRE, the research team was able to easily and confidently provision the file system as needed without IT expertise. They never once had to read a manual, undergo full‑scale training, or contact STORViX’s technical support to get up and running.
