Quantum has revealed that two research institutions in Europe are using its StorNext workflow storage for managing their data and enabling scientific initiatives.
GWDG
GWDG, the computing center for the University of Gottingen and computing and IT competence center for the Max Planck Society, has deployed StorNext-powered disk and tape systems in a multi-tier solution to meet its performance and access requirements for 7 PB of data.
GWDG supports more than 40,000 users and needed a high-performance storage system that could handle billions of files. The storage platform from Quantum supported a multi-tier storage environment, including making 2.5PB of data on disk and 4.5PB on tape accessible from a single file system.
StorNext enables the center’s IT group to support users across operating systems and manage a large data archive without hiring extra staff. GWDG provides the center’s High Performance Computing (HPC) cluster with shared access to data from the StorNext environment at speeds above its requirements.
The IT group has installed StorNext distributed LAN clients on HPC nodes for access over Ethernet, generating speeds of 3.2GB/second, compared to the 2GB/second performance HPC users had requested. These users can move large amounts of data into the cluster for processing and out again for long-term storage.
Max Planck Institute
One of the research projects of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry involves the study of climate change in the Brazilian rainforest and includes measurement devices collecting up to 80GB of data daily. The data is transported to a data center in Germany for processing and making available to researchers around the world.
The Institute worked with microstaxx — a system integrator to identify a solution — and selected StorNext.
StorNext has reduced the need for teams to acquire and maintain their own storage environments by delivering robust performance, capacity and support for a range of client operating systems (including Linux, UNIX, Windows and Mac).
The Institute has gained from the integrated data protection StorNext provides. Max Planck can protect research data automatically and continuously in the background leveraging multi-tier data management and a Quantum Scalar i6000 tape library.
Quantum’s Active Vault feature enables archiving of tapes inside the library instead of on a shelf and minimize costs and cartridge handling while improving security and access to vaulted content.
Quantum’s Extended Data Life Management helps prevent data loss by checking the data on a tape and copying it to a new tape during security issues.
“With the StorNext platform, we have removed barriers to research. It allows us to provide a lot more capacity quickly and easily. We don’t need to give research teams data limits, and storage for new projects can be ready in an afternoon,” said Thomas Disper, CISO and head of IT, Max Planck Institute for Chemistry.
