MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center Relies on Exablox and Veeam

Exablox Corp. announced that MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC) has deployed Exablox’s OneBlox as its primary storage for local users’ files and images as well as its target for Veeam Software, Inc.‘s backups to protect the lab’s ground-breaking research.

The PSFC’s primary focus is the development of fusion power – the process that lights the stars, including our sun – as a potentially endless source of clean energy. Supported by more than 250 personnel and employing 2,000 connected devices, the lab’s research creates an endless stream of vast amounts of unstructured data that must be retained and analyzed in perpetuity. The lab must also retain local user files, images and backups. After evaluating numerous storage vendors, the PSFC decided that Exablox’s scale-out solution was able to satisfy its critical storage challenges.

“Our scientists and researchers rely on their critical research data, and with our growing capacity needs, our data would be put at risk if we were to lose multiple RAID drives,” said Lee Berkowitz, IT and network manager, PSFC. “We knew a traditional RAID-based solution wouldn’t meet our needs, and we also knew we needed a simple and cost-effective solution. At the same time, we didn’t want to compromise on the enterprise features we required. This is why we selected Exablox for our solution.“

The PSFC was faced with managing and protecting a growing amount of user-generated data. Its prior storage system relied on legacy RAID, but with its inherent lengthy rebuild time in case of drive failure and inability to expand capacity, this legacy storage was no longer capable of meeting PSFC’s needs. When evaluating their next storage solution, the PSFC IT team knew they required a solution that would enable them to expand storage, support their backup and recovery infrastructure, and improve data resiliency. Of equal importance to the team, in which everyone wears multiple hats, was a solution that would be easy to implement and maintain, and not require forklift upgrades as storage capacity demands increase in the coming years.

PSFC has been using OneBlox, managed by OneSystem, for primary and backup storage because of its rich feature set and the ‘set it and forget it’ nature of the platform. Exablox’s zero-configuration implementation and its scale-out object-based architecture enabled PSFC to scale to meet its evolving needs without configuring RAID volumes or LUNs. By enabling CDP with unlimited automatic snapshots, Exablox ensures all of PSFC’s important data is protected and can be recovered when needed. Exablox’s OneSystem is a secure, multi-tenant, cloud-based management system that manages OneBlox from any browser, providing a higher level of storage services while reducing management time.

Since the deployment of OneBlox, PSFC has been spending less time managing storage and backups, and the robustness of OneBlox and its greater uptime are expected to provide cost savings. The added assurance that Exablox support is monitoring the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center’s storage infrastructure and will notify the Center if anything is out of the ordinary, provides peace of mind that the Center’s ground-breaking research is safe.