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Limerick Institute of Technology Manages Data Increase with Ethernet Storage Area Network
The Limerick Institute of Technology (LIT) in Ireland has implemented an Ethernet storage area network (SAN) featuring high performance arrays with serial-attached-SCSI (SAS) disks.
LIT's data storage requirements began to exceed 160 terabytes in 2010. Anticipating growth of 15 percent per year, the IT team started looking for a scalable storage platform that could grow with the institution's data storage needs.
The institute selected a scalable Ethernet storage solution from Coraid. The IT team began by implementing a 13 TB solution consisting of a Coraid EtherDrive SRX3200 array with 600 GB SAS disks. The team was satisfied with the solution's reliability, flexibility, and cost-effectiveness and decided to scale the system with SRX2800 arrays, deploying more than 106 TB of storage.
The Coraid EtherDrive SRX series provides low-latency, high-bandwidth data transfer between hosts and data on the network, and each SRX runs the CorOS distributed storage operating system to pool individual building blocks into a single platform.
“The system has easily met all our criteria in terms of reliability and performance," said Joe O'Gorman, technical officer at LIT, in a prepared statement. "The platform runs in a high-availability configuration which has offered 100 percent reliability for the last 24 months. Our decision to become an early adopter of Ethernet SAN has paid off in every way.”
In the future, the LIT IT team plans to develop its own private cloud, and the Coraid solution supports the institution's need for integration between the underlying storage layer, its increasingly virtualized servers, and private cloud development plans. "Coraid's Ethernet storage allows us to easily mix and match SATA, SAS, and SSD drives, which fitted in with our plans to develop our own cloud," said O'Gorman.
The Limerick Institute of Technology is one of 13 members of the Institutes of Technology Ireland (IOTI). The school serves more than 6,000 full-time students at seven locations and offers programs in art and design, engineering and IT, business, and, humanities.
Further information about Coraid's scalable Ethernet storage solutions can be found at Coraid's site.
About the Author
Leila Meyer is a technology writer based in British Columbia. She can be reached at leilameyer@gmail.com.