Avere Chosen by Johns Hopkins University

Avere Systems, Inc., announced that The Johns Hopkins University, in education, research and patient care, has increased research productivity at its Human Language Technology Center of Excellence (HLTCOE) by deploying its FXT Series Edge filers to help gain real-time insights from over 250TB of speech, text and image data.

This data is processed using a HPC cluster, consisting of 150 nodes and 2,500 cores utilizing Sun Grid Engine and Hadoop. the university has doubled its amount of HPC grid jobs from 1.2 to 2.4 million per month using the much more cost-effective Avere solution.

Prior to its deployment of Avere, Johns Hopkins faced an unmanageable level of demand on its IT infrastructure.

“Bandwidth was saturated, and we were experiencing a rapidly lengthening queue for HPC grid jobs,” said Scott Roberts, IT manager, HLTCOE. “The grid workload also impacted responsiveness to user desktops, slowing access to home directories. Our challenge was to find a solution that dramatically improved performance, but did not require a large upfront investment, a lot of on-going care and feeding, or expensive upgrades at future performance thresholds.“

After evaluating numerous high-end storage arrays, the university selected and deployed an FXT Edge filer cluster in conjunction with ZFS-based core filers. The combined solution helped the university both meet and exceed performance and cost objectives.

“Deploying an Avere cluster allowed us to double the number of jobs we can process, from 1.2 million per month to more than 2.4 million. Obtaining equivalent performance via a traditional storage array would have exceeded our entire annual IT budget by more than five times,” explained Roberts. “Avere met our performance requirements in a smaller footprint and assured incremental scalability that protects us against future out-of-band capital expenditures.“

“We’re proud and excited to be part of The Johns Hopkins University cutting edge research,” said Ron Bianchini, president and CEO, Avere. “Using Avere, researchers are able to improve productivity to fuel research breakthroughs despite the uncertainties of a grant-based budget that can vary from year to year.“

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