George Washington University Runs on Nexenta Software-Defined Storage

Nexenta Systems, Inc. announced the deployment of NexentaStor by The George Washington University.

The School of Medicine and Health Sciences (SMHS) is using NexentaStor to scale its storage capacity and ensure HA and security of important data without requiring additional IT resources.

Thanks to Nexenta, the university faculty has been able to focus on their efforts on research while minimizing the cost of procuring and managing storage. For example, the university was able to expand their existing Nexenta appliance by 16TB for less than $7,000.

Founded in 1824, George Washington University SMHS runs  programs in the health and biomedical sciences. SMHS research and teaching activities depend on access to IT to carry out their investigations into areas like cancer, epilepsy and genomics and proteomics. The IT group supports the school’s 1,500 staff and faculty by taking care of everything from desktop support and user training to managing server and storage resources, including web servers and computational clusters for genomics analysis.

Garrett Fields, technical support analyst, was tasked with looking at alternatives to SMHS’s existing storage infrastructure. Until recently, the university data center housed SMHS’s group and home drives. The university didn’t charge researchers by the terabyte, but contained costs by putting a cap on the amount of storage they could use. As the school’s researchers generated more and more data, this arrangement became increasingly problematic. Researchers were turning to workarounds – such as setting up external HDDs in their labs, which compromised both data security and accessibility.

To address these challenges, SMHS’s IT team was looking for an open SDS system that could offer greater accuracy as well as the freedom from lock-in to certain vendors or hardware. After evaluating three different solutions, the team determined that Nexenta was the best choice. Built-in HA, quality of support, expertise and focus on storage along with open source benefits were the key factors that led the team to select NexentaStor.

“We needed a better solution,” said Fields. “Our researchers were looking for huge amounts of storage, and we thought we could meet their needs more cost-effectively than the university data center. But we were only going to take on responsibility for storage provision if we could ensure excellent performance and extraordinary reliability, as we achieved cost savings.“

Thanks to the administrative ease of Nexenta, the SMHS IT group was able to take on its new storage responsibilities without adding staff. In addition, eliminating time spent managing and troubleshooting researchers’ external drives allows existing staff to focus on other important IT initiatives. Scaling up is also much more cost-effective – when the group reached 70% capacity on its backup server, it was able to add 16TB for less than $7,000.

SMHS researchers who used to rely on external HDDs now enjoy greater data security, availability and ease of access. At the same time, there is no difference in performance for other users.

Fields stated, “Thanks to Nexenta, we’ve managed to free our researchers from restrictions on their storage, so they can move full steam ahead on their research, confident that they’re capturing and safeguarding all the data their projects generate.“

“We are honored to help The George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences increase security and maintain performance for researchers, faculty and students by transitioning to an SDS solution that offers the flexibility of being able to increase storage capacity as data requirements grow and, at the same time, keep costs low,” said Tarkan Maner, chairman and CEO, Nexenta. “With HA from Nexenta, ensuring that SMHS data can be brought up in a relatively recent state, the university also has a practical DR plan in place and can now avoid risks to data integrity and reliability – which is crucial given the university’s important research.“

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