Customer story · Higher education and research · Belgium
The Department of Plant Biotechnology and Bioinformatics at Ghent University needed to archive simulation data that must outlast the research, on storage its scientists could grow themselves.
Seconds
To scale from a few terabytes to petabytes, with no RAID rebuild
STORViX customer story — Ghent University
0
Manuals, training sessions or support calls needed to get up and running
STORViX customer story — Ghent University
NFS
File services connected directly to the simulation servers
STORViX customer story — Ghent University
The challenge
Simulation-based research produced large volumes of critical data quickly. The department needed a centralised, multiprotocol system for extremely secure archiving with NFS file services to the simulation servers, and could not spend research time upgrading hardware or subscriptions to get more space.
The solution
An AiRE IntelligentFiler 3122 connected directly to the simulation servers, scaling from a few terabytes to petabytes in seconds with no RAID rebuild to wait for, and provisioned by the researchers themselves.
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 that research is simulation-based, and it has to withstand the test of time: losing it would be a major blow to the department's efforts. The requirement was a centralised, multiprotocol data storage system for extremely secure archiving of simulation data, with NFS file services connected to the simulation servers.
New research can produce large amounts of data quickly, and the research team does not have time to spend upgrading hardware or subscriptions to get access to more space. Ease of scaling was therefore the deciding property, not a nice-to-have.
When STORViX demonstrated that AiRE could scale from a few terabytes to petabytes in a few seconds, without waiting for a RAID rebuild, the research team had no doubt this was the agile storage they needed.
An AiRE IntelligentFiler 3122 was connected directly to the simulation servers to store the department's critical simulation data. The platform provides continuous protection from corruption, disasters and breaches, and keeps performance optimal by automating I/O path management, application profile recognition and data reduction.
A unified storage system gave the department the agility it was after. The research team could use the system quickly and easily, and spend more time on research. The benefit the department appreciated most was how easy the system was to install and use: the researchers provision the file system as needed, without IT expertise, and never once had to read a manual, undergo full-scale training or contact STORViX technical support to get up and running.
Ghent University is a top-100 university and one of the major universities in Belgium. Its eleven faculties offer a wide range of courses and conduct in-depth research across many scientific domains, and it was the first European university on the Songdo Global University Campus in South Korea. Located in Flanders, it is an active partner in national and international educational, scientific and industrial cooperation, with research groups renowned worldwide in disciplines including biotechnology, aquaculture, microelectronics and history.
The Department of Plant Biotechnology and Bioinformatics educates students in biochemistry, biotechnology, plant biotechnology and bioinformatics, and works towards a better, more quantitative molecular understanding of cellular processes by integrating and modelling high-throughput molecular data.
Results
Source: STORViX customer story. Figures are the customer’s own as published by STORViX and have not been independently verified.
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An architect will tell you what a comparable configuration would look like for your workload, capacity and constraint, and what it would not do.