Universities have had to adjust to a rapidly shifting IT ecosystem as the education sector turns toward new engagement mediums such as online classrooms and video-based learning. The influx of new media is a positive thing for students and teachers, but it can also present a storage challenge. In particular, even though they are experiencing 30 percent annual data growth, education IT departments must still ensure performance to prevent latency issues. To solve this issue, Rutgers University turned to Xyratex, a Seagate Cloud Builder Alliance partner. The organization adopted ClusterStor 1500, a scaled-out, high-performance computing solution.
“Departments at large organizations or medium-sized enterprises today need high-performing and scalable storage solutions that are easy to deploy and manage, cost-efficient and reliable even under demanding workloads,” said Ken Claffey, senior vice president of ClusterStor at Xyratex. “As companies of all sizes are increasingly utilizing complex simulation and modeling applications running on Linux-based compute clusters, traditional enterprise storage systems cannot meet the performance and scalability needs of these environment.”
Claffey further explained that ClusterStor 1500 was designed specifically to bring the high performance capabilities of the Lustre file system to the simulation and modeling software market.
ClusterStor 1500 has so far met the needs of various industries, from media and entertainment organizations to cloud storage companies. The systems can be scaled from 42 terabytes to 7.3 petabytes total capacity and from 1.25 gigabytes/second to 110 GB/s. In addition, the platform’s time-to-deployment is significantly lower than traditional data storage systems, requiring only several hours to set up rather than several weeks. Following the initial configuration, cloud infrastructure administration is further simplified through the ClusterStor Manager, which includes a single interface for the operating system, RAID data protection and system management application.
