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Cornell Biotech Institute Moves to Red Hat Scalable Storage Software Appliance

Cornell University Institute for Biotechnology and Life Science Technologies has implemented a new highly available and scalable storage software appliance to support the institute's data-intensive research projects.

Research projects at the institute generate 15 TB to more than 20 TB of data each month. The legacy file systems the institute had been using for storage could store a maximum of 8 TB and 16 TB of data per node. The institute set out to identify a solution that would enable them to access all of their data in every node.

It chose Red Hat Storage, formerly known as Gluster, which enables organizations to implement storage as a "virtualized, commoditized, and scale-on-demand pool." The institute was able to implement Red Hat Storage on its existing disks, so it did not have to purchase new servers or storage hardware.

"The idea of a scale-out storage solution was something we'd always been interested in but never could implement due to cost," said James VanEe, IT director of Cornell's Institute for Biotechnology and Life Science Technologies, in a prepared statement. "With Red Hat Storage we are able to avoid significant costs with a cost-efficient software solution, while keeping our infrastructure in place. It enables us to scale easily and affordably without affecting our system's performance."

Red Hat Storage is available as a storage software appliance or a virtual storage appliance. The storage software appliance is a software-based network-attached storage (NAS) appliance. The virtual storage appliance is a software-only solution and is optimized for Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Cornell University Institute for Biotechnology and Life Science Technologies is located in Ithaca, NY. It promotes the education and training of biologists, engineers, agricultural personnel, and medical scientists, and supports university scientists conducting research in the biological and physical sciences. It also provides administrative support to the Center for Life Science Enterprise, the Life Sciences Core Laboratories Center, and the Institute for Genomic Diversity, and it is the administrative home to the McGovern Family Center for Venture Development in the Life Sciences.

About the Author

Leila Meyer is a technology writer based in British Columbia. She can be reached at [email protected].

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