Nexsan Selected by Brigham Young University

Nexsan Corporation announced that the computer science department at Brigham Young University has deployed Nexsan’s Flexible Storage Platform to support its multi-purpose storage infrastructure.



Selected for high performance, reliability, efficiency and value, the Flexible Storage Platform supports the department’s virtualized operating environment with high capacity storage for both structured and unstructured data.

Brigham Young University is the United States' largest religious university and the third largest private university in the country. The university's Department of Computer Science is known for its high caliber of faculty, research programs and research facilities. Recent achievements include development and maintenance of phpLDAPadmin, an open source project.

Researchers at the university's computer science department create tremendous volumes of data. To better manage it, they needed a reliable back-end storage solution for their VMware vSphere 4 enabled virtual operating environment. At any one time as many as 40 virtual machines can be configured in support of research storage needs, including structured Oracle and MySQL database data and unstructured file and image information. As a result, the department required a flexible and reliable disk array that would support their active virtual environment.

"For us, reliability and reporting were important features in our storage system selection process," said Loren Harshbarger, Systems & Network Architect /Manager, in the computer science department of Brigham Young University. "I had used Nexsan systems in the past and was confident in their performance, enterprise-class features and reliability. What's more, the Nexsan Flexible Storage Platform allows both iSCSI and FC connectivity for our virtual computing infrastructure and features such as LUN masking for a secure multi-user environment. This makes the Nexsan solution exceptionally flexible for our multi-purpose storage requirements."

Harshbarger turned to IO Dynamics, a Nexsan VAR, to deploy a flexible storage solution to address the department's dynamic infrastructure. Because this IT environment was required to support all types of data in a flexible way, Nexsan was selected as the vendor of choice. As a result, the computer science department received reliability storage along with features, such as power consumption reduction, and a low TCO for this virtual operating environment.

The computer science department deployed Nexsan storage populated with 1TB SATA drives. The SATA RAID storage system is connected to an HP BladeSystem C3000 enclosure with a dynamic mix of approximately 40 virtual machines.

Key benefits from this flexible storage environment include:

• Energy-efficient AutoMAID Level-3 technology which saves up to 60% in energy costs compared to alternative storage systems
• The ability to combine SAS, SATA and SSD disks in the same system for ultimate storage flexibility
• Support for both FC and iSCSI interfaces
• User-friendly storage management for configuring and monitoring multiple Nexsan RAID storage systems from a single interface
• Reporting and alert features for greater insight into storage processes

With the Nexsan storage system in place, students and faculty at the University are afforded continuous access to data in support of computer science department projects. One such project includes a Facebook application called Relative Finder, created by several BYU computer science major students and Professor Tom Sederberg. The application is run on a virtual web server and virtual MySQL server which reside on Nexsan storage. Relative Finder allows users to search back an average of nine or ten generations to find relatives and can show relationships to famous historical figures.

"As demonstrated in this case, today's organizations need storage systems that deliver superior flexibility and performance," said Victoria Grey, Senior Vice President, Marketing, Nexsan. "Nexsan's Flexible Storage Platform has been developed specifically to meet these requirements. Offering high density, reliability and performance, Nexsan storage systems reduce operating costs while providing the ideal solution for multi-purpose storage environments."