Stanford School of Earth Sciences Installs Exanet

Stanford University’s School of Earth Sciences installed an ExaStore 2008 Clustered NAS System to facilitate its mission of “harnessing science and engineering for the benefit of humankind.”

 
“We chose ExaStore because its high capacity and high performance provides generous data storage capacity for individual and research group use,” says Phil Farrell, Computer Systems Manager for the School of Earth Sciences. “ExaStore lets us offer a central repository of protected shareable disk storage that can be accessed from any computer on the network.”
 
ExaStore runs a cluster of multiple servers working together transparently, providing the highest performance and scalability. It is installed on Exanet EX1500 cluster NAS servers and storage arrays and allows for independent expansion on either piece of hardware or both simultaneously. As part of initial installation support, Exanet also provided Stanford with direct access to a high-level engineer to smooth out technical issues of conversion from its old legacy system.
 
Previously, a small Unix server provided only limited file storage, and researchers had to store large data sets and analyses on local workstations. Data protection was limited, and sharing files with others was very difficult. In some cases, large files were transferred between workstations and compute clusters using portable hard disks. Now, each user can share the terabytes of well-protected data available under ExaStore’s single namespace, allowing easy file sharing among colleagues.

“Now that the system is in place, I can educate our users about the vast possibilities they have with data management on ExaStore,” Farrell continues.
 
For example, before ExaStore, students using the School’s computer teaching cluster stored their multi-gigabyte class projects on the local PC hard drives. Therefore, they had to use the same computer each time to ensure access to their data, and if that PC had hardware problems, their work could be lost. With ExaStore, all students experience the convenience of a streamlined system where the lab PCs automatically access file shares on the ExaStore system, protecting their files and allowing them to use any computer in the lab.
 
“With record performance speeds and potential for long-term growth via its scalability, ExaStore will be an integral part of the School of Earth Sciences’ data management for quite a long time,” says Lior Gal, Exanet’s Vice President, Sales, West Coast. “The way the system is built, whenever Phil wants to add the latest hardware technology to his ExaStore software, he can expand it online without any hassles or downtime.”