The challenge
Slow backups put vital North Sea research data at risk and stalled a planned consolidation of several departments under one central IT function, while the new platform also had to run virtual machines and archive simulation results.
Customer story · Scientific research and museums · Belgium
Secure VMs and faster backups with a 15-minute RPO.
How the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences (RBINS) secured all its IT services by integrating AiRE with Proxmox, and turned a slow backup situation around by bringing its recovery point objective down to 15 minutes.
- AiRE IntelligentFiler 3128 (two systems)
- Proxmox Virtual Environment
- Third AiRE system added after year one
15 min
Recovery point objective after protection points moved to AiRE
STORViX customer story — Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences
2 + 1
AiRE IntelligentFiler 3128 systems, with a third added after the first year
STORViX customer story — Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences
All
IT servers run as Proxmox virtual machines on AiRE
STORViX customer story — Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences
The solution
Two AiRE IntelligentFiler 3128 systems, integrated with Proxmox so that every IT server runs as a virtual machine on AiRE, with simulation archives on the same platform and a third system added after the first year.
- AiRE IntelligentFiler 3128 (two systems)
- Proxmox Virtual Environment
- Third AiRE system added after year one
The situation
Slow backup operations posed a risk to RBINS's ability to ensure its vital North Sea research data could be quickly secured. With infrastructure growing rapidly and plans to bring the operations of several departments together under a single central IT function, RBINS was concerned that its solution at the time would not be robust enough to handle this vast increase in data. Backup time was such a concern that the directorate held back the planned consolidation until a more agile solution could be found.
It was also crucial that a new solution could ensure optimal performance tailored to RBINS's fields of research and needs. This included using the system to manage virtual machines and providing a suitable space to archive the results of simulations. The solution therefore also had to be easy to integrate with simulation software and VM management software.
What was deployed
STORViX initially delivered two AiRE IntelligentFiler model 3128 systems to speed up backup time and keep both the virtual machines and the simulation data safe. 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.
Through integration with Proxmox, AiRE runs all IT servers that are virtual machines, so that the institute's IT services are always secure and functional. Proxmox Virtual Environment is a complete open-source platform for enterprise virtualisation that tightly integrates the KVM hypervisor and LXC containers, software-defined storage and networking on a single platform, and manages high-availability clusters and disaster recovery tools from its built-in web interface.
What changed
Thanks to AiRE's smart provisioning, the RBINS team saw a substantial improvement in the time it took to set up protection points, resulting in a recovery point objective of only 15 minutes.
After the first year, RBINS was so impressed with the value AiRE added for its teams, and with how enjoyable it was to use, that it ordered another AiRE system to scale the solution and meet its need for more archiving space. RBINS and STORViX are also planning to use AiRE's data protection and replication features to enable offsite copies.
About the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences
The Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences is one of the ten federal scientific establishments governed by the Belgian Science Policy Office (Belspo). It is involved in important scientific research activities and carries out public service missions, and it is open to everyone through the Museum of Natural Sciences. Its research team comprises 165 scientists and dozens of scientific staff, technicians and volunteers: biologists, ecologists, geologists, mineralogists, palaeontologists, anthropologists, oceanographers, engineers and computer experts, which enables multidisciplinary research.
The institute's collections of approximately 38 million specimens form an inexhaustible research resource. These biodiversity archives are used to classify existing species and identify new ones, and to study their ecosystems, which enables RBINS to inform policies that protect and preserve biodiversity. With techniques such as CT scans, isotope analysis and DNA sequencing, researchers glean new information from old material on a daily basis.
Results
What was measured afterwards
- Recovery point objective brought down to 15 minutes
- Every IT server runs as a Proxmox virtual machine on AiRE, keeping the institute's services secure and available
- A third AiRE system ordered after the first year to add archiving capacity
“Superior robustness and high flexibility. After having used the STORViX storage solution for 7 years, we can testify to not having had a single software failure that would have compromised our operational systems in any impactful way.”
Where this applies
More stories
Other customers who moved.
Cooperative credit banking · Italy
Banca d'Alba
Strategic resilience: Banca d'Alba's email compliance evolution with STORViX and Archivium.
The GDPR puts strict requirements on how corporations store personal information. For a financial institution such as Banca d'Alba, compliance is not just a legal duty but a responsibility to maintain trust among clients and stakeholders. To address GDPR compliance and email management, the bank partnered with STORViX and Archivium.
- Corporate email archived in line with GDPR, with automatic deletion as the Italian Data Protection Authority recommends
- Communications from former associates preserved long term, as the Data Protection Authority requires
- Among the first Italian banks to address email management systematically under current regulations
Source: STORViX customer story
Cloud services and managed security · Italy
Eteria
Sub-millisecond latency for a cloud provider's most demanding tenant.
An Italian cloud and managed security provider serving more than 2,000 companies put Zerto-replicated customer VMs on all-flash AiRE with a hard latency ceiling.
- Sub-millisecond maximum latency achieved
- Compression factor of 2
- At least 50% saved on the investment
Source: STORViX customer story
Map this onto your own estate.
An architect will tell you what a comparable configuration would look like for your workload, capacity and constraint, and what it would not do.