Northern Arizona U Deploys Software-Defined Storage for Research Data
Northern Arizona University has implemented a software-defined storage (SDS) appliance to support
large research data sets, such as genome maps, Landsat images and
complex chemistry data sets.
The university's IT services
department supports researchers in the areas of astronomy,
bioinformatics, computational chemistry, cropland mapping, human
microbiome analysis and microbial genomics. However, the data sets had
outgrown the storage and processing capacity of the individual research
labs located throughout the university's various schools and
departments.
Christopher Coffey, the high performance computing
(HPC) research administrator for the university, and his team evaluated
several storage options, including SAN-based RAID systems and ZFS
systems. They wanted to find a system that would be compatible with the
university's HPC system, which consists of Dell servers and Mellanox InfiniBand/Virtual Protocol Interconnect (VPI) switches with ConnectX-3 cards.
Coffey and his team selected the NexentaStor open source-driven software-defined storage (OpenSDS) platform from Nexenta.
According to information from the company, NexentaStor delivers
intermediate archival storage with compression for petabyte-scale
active archives. Its snapshots capability enables the retrieval of
original or lost files locally through network file system (NFS) and
server message block (SMB) object services from around the campus. It
also removes the need for prep steps prior to moving data into place
for analysis.
"No other option we looked at surpassed Nexenta's
features, flexibility and ZFS support," said Coffey in a news release.
"Since implementation of the NexentaStor appliance, it's been hands
off, requiring minimal maintenance, which is a big deal for us." He
added that the Nexenta system has saved the university money because
the compression has enabled them to reduce the footprint of the
datasets.
About the Author
Leila Meyer is a technology writer based in British Columbia. She can be reached at [email protected].