U Sussex Adopts Software-Defined Storage
The University of Sussex in the United Kingdom has
implemented a new software-defined storage system to improve network performance
and support future expansion of its IT infrastructure.
The University of Sussex is a single-campus university serving 13,000
students and employing 2,100 faculty and staff. Students, faculty and staff each
have their own home directory on the network that enables them to access their
files from any device anywhere on campus. However, when the university's
five-year-old network storage system was approaching the end of its useful life,
the IT department started looking at its options.
The team considered sticking with the same vendor but also looked at
alternatives before deciding to switch to
NexentaStor from
Nexenta. According to James Goodlet, head
of infrastructure services, IT services at the university, the team chose
NexentaStor because of the company's thorough customer support throughout the
evaluation process, in addition to the product's cost-effectiveness.
NexentaStor is a software-defined storage (SDS) platform. It runs on
industry-standard hardware and can support implementations from tens of
terabytes to petabytes of data. Along with NexentaStor, the University of Sussex
also implemented Dell
PowerEdge R720
rack servers with SAS HBA cards and solid state disks. According to information
on Nexenta's site, "the university has two data centers with 200 physical
servers and 200 virtual ones," and both sites "are clustered with tiered storage
using SAS hard drives and SSDs with 110 TB of capacity each." The university
replicates its primary data center to the secondary site on an hourly basis.
To support its growing research data warehouse, the university is planning to
expand its implementation of NexentaStor to include another 200 TB for high
availability storage.
About the Author
Leila Meyer is a technology writer based in British Columbia. She can be reached at [email protected].