BlueArc Speeds Access to H.W. Wilson Research Library

BlueArc Corporation announced that H.W. Wilson, a research and reference publisher whose WilsonWeb platform is the primary information resource for some of the world’s most prestigious universities and institutions, has implemented a BlueArc Titan storage cluster to dramatically improve online access to more than 20 million digital documents and images. Titan’s performance and capacity ensure that H.W. Wilson has plenty of room to expand its offering, while streamlining management of a vast library of text and images.

"We knew our strategic decision to centralize H.W. Wilson’s digital library supporting WilsonWeb would really put storage to the test," said Lu Parziale, Vice President, Information Systems at H.W. Wilson. "The demands on our storage infrastructure are data-intensive and include a Web search that interfaces with databases and full text. Only BlueArc demonstrated the technology and outstanding support that could meet our needs."

Since H. W. Wilson pioneered the research and reference index in 1898, the Company has amassed millions of periodical articles, the complete texts of books, scholarly works, and a sizable collection of images all accessed via WilsonWeb. Titan is at the heart of a tiered storage infrastructure comprising more than sixty terabytes. The system delivers consistently fast responses to queries to the WilsonWeb online databases, replacing an unwieldy collection of legacy storage devices whose performance usually fades with rising cache size over the course of a user’s session.

Cluster Streamlines Management
The Titan cluster is designed to support uninterrupted service even through storage maintenance and administration, with a node dedicated to customers and a node assigned to internal company tasks. Parziale has observed greater efficiency in daily procedures such as rebooting the application underpinning WilsonWeb, which are now at least 40 percent faster. Titan makes short work of backups as well. The limitations of decentralized, legacy technology made it impractical for Parziale’s team to do more than backup larger data sets weekly, but Titan supports H.W. Wilson’s complete, daily backup of millions of files in just a few hours.

As the H.W. Wilson collections grow and the company offers services to supplement customers’ data collections, Titan’s hardware-based architecture and modular design make it easy for H.W. Wilson to add capacity by simply adding modules or disks. Just as important for Parziale, H.W. Wilson IT staff needs no specialized storage expertise to support this vital aspect of the research provider’s expansion.