ACADEMIA

AssuredSAN Storage Array Transforms Capacity Expansion with Leading Performance

Dot Hill Systems has been selected by the Knowledge Media Institute within the Open University's research and development centre, to update the Institute's storage infrastructure to support the increasing data demands of academic research.

The Open University (OU) is the UK's largest academic university with 260,000 students based in the UK and around the world taking accredited online courses this academic year. In recognition of the need for the OU to be at the forefront of research and development in areas such as cognitive and learning sciences; multimedia, artificial intelligence and semantic technologies, the Knowledge Media Institute (KMi) was established in 1995. Today it employs over 90 people, comprising a mix of researchers, technologists, designers and administrative staff, and is rapidly expanding due to increased volumes of academic projects. With this expansion the requirements for data storage have also increased rapidly to serve the multitude of research projects.

The KMi therefore needed to expand its Storage Area Network (SAN) to accommodate these growing demands. As a result, the IT team decided that a new, scalable, high-performance platform with storage density was the answer.

Dot Hill partner NCE was brought on board and recommended the Dot Hill AssuredSAN 3720 8Gb Fibre Channel networked RAID array with 2.5 inch drive technology. John Greenwood, solution sales director at NCE said, "Based on our experience of working with Dot Hill for several years, we are confident that this is the best storage solution in terms of quality, reliability and flexibility required to support KMi's sophisticated research and development projects."

The data workload characteristics at the KMi vary considerably with a mixture of web-based applications, databases and supercomputing tasks dedicated to specific research projects. The ability to mix drive types including SAS, SATA and SSD within the Dot Hill storage arrays is invaluable as it allows the user to make the most effective use of storage resources based on the data workload and data life cycle.

"Very often we have HPC requirements where the high-performance 2.5-inch SAS drives running over our Fibre Channel SAN deliver the performance we need, however most research projects have a three-year active life and a five-year data archive requirement so it makes more sense to utilise lower-cost, bulk SATA storage for this purpose," explained Paul Alexander, Systems and Development Manager at KMi.

The most significant advantage of the Dot Hill platform for this user has been the performance density offered by the small form factor (SFF) 2.5-inch drives used in the AssuredSAN 3720 systems as data centre space is a premium, but as server and storage virtualisation is deployed extensively within this datacentre the full VMware certification of Dot Hill's AssuredSAN range was also a determining factor for the KMi.

"The incredible flexibility of our AssuredSAN systems is a great asset," added Warren Reid, director of EMEA marketing at Dot Hill, "From mixing drive types to the modular design, our systems give users a wide range of options that enable them to upgrade the storage infrastructure while maintaining access to existing data, and all with maximum reuse of their existing infrastructure."