Harvard Tackles Storage Issues
The Life Sciences program is comprised of many interdisciplinary research areas,
including departments in chemistry and biology. While every research community
has a unique focus and specific projects of interest, there is a great deal
of cross-departmental collaboration and shared initiatives among our thousands
of researchers and scientists. A vital technology priority among the various
Life Sciences areas is the need for fast and efficient data storage.
The Technology Dilemma
Steadily increasing research data requirements within the Life Sciences mandated
a better mass-storage system, one beyond the traditional, limited direct-attached
storage and network-attached storage (NAS) options used by many research departments.
Our existing storage systems were not scalable; there was a limited quantity
of storage available to each server and no effective way of centrally managing
the proliferation of independent storage solutions. We found that while we could
always buy larger drives, we were hitting the manageability and scalability
limits of the drives that could be attached.
While there was the option to purchase storage-area network (SAN) capability
through Harvard’s central IT services, the cost was deemed prohibitive
and the available capacity wouldn’t meet our future storage needs.
Any new data storage solution would first have to interact seamlessly with
the Life Sciences’ heterogeneous client environments. In addition, we
had three specific criteria for our storage needs: scalability, performance,
and cost. We also wanted flexibility, the capability to have both fast Fibre
Channel and slower, less-expensive ATA storage managed together. We needed a
vendor whose system could scale as high as possible, because we don’t
know how many users would be involved in our community’s future.
Harvard Life Sciences ultimately determined that building a SAN fabric was
too expensive, both standalone NAS and direct-attached storage were far too
limited, and that a hybrid NAS-on-SAN approach would give the most flexibility
and scalability for considerably less cost.
We chose the BlueArc Titan SiliconServer, a modular network storage system
that can fetch and retrieve data from disk arrays at extremely high speed and
manage the data loads under a single file system. Titan can handle 256 trillion
bytes of information. Its special programmable architecture transfers data to
drives at 5Gbps, and BlueArc is aiming to hike that speed to 20Gbps in the near
future.
Titan’s hardware-based Silicon File System uses virtual volumes to partition
data for users, groups or departments—allowing storage administrators
to dynamically expand and contract storage allocations to meet individual needs.
This eliminates downtime that many other systems require due to data migration
and reallocation.
With our new Titan systems, Harvard Life Sciences already has 28 terabytes
of mixed Fibre Channel and ATA storage, all managed together. We are poised
for quick growth and can use our storage solution for a wide range of needs—from
traditional file and database services to replacing old, expensive tape backup
solutions, even as a fail-safe mechanism for disaster recovery at an off-site
location.
Future storage needs are no longer a worry, as Titan allows Harvard Life Sciences
to grow our mass-storage solution without requiring purchase of additional controllers—a
key differentiator from other vendor options.
Our community will benefit from Titan’s modular blade architecture that
provides investment protection—including upgrades to new technologies
like 10Gb Ethernet. In addition to its technical capabilities, the BlueArc system
will eventually save the Life Sciences Program millions of dollars, as our teams
will be able to consolidate our hundreds of terabytes of direct-attached storage
spread across thousands of servers.
Cost savings also filter down to our user base, because users no longer need
to buy their own individual, limited, backup or mass-storage solutions. This
is basically a shared resource among all of our researchers.
We expect that the Titan product will provide a fourfold increase over our
current performance metrics and that performance will only increase as we upgrade
our Ethernet networks to support 10GB capabilities. We’ve been extremely
pleased with our choice and the solution that BlueArc has been able to provide.