HEAnet Deploying Isilon NAS

Isilon Systems announced that Ireland’s National Education and Research Network, HEAnet Ltd., has deployed Isilon scale-out NAS to centralize a wide breadth of Internet services, including multimedia delivery, data backup and hosting, for Ireland’s universities, institutes of technology, and research and educational communities.

Using Isilon IQ, HEAnet has unified massive repositories of academic information, including video archives of the Irish Parliament and large research databases, onto a single, high performance, highly scalable, shared pool of storage, streamlining content access to improve Internet response times, reliability and service level agreements for higher education in Ireland.

"We provide a wide range of Internet-related services to all of Ireland’s primary and secondary schools, so our ability to immediately and effectively respond to changing client demand is of the utmost importance," said Justin Hourigan, senior network engineer, HEAnet. "We simply can’t afford to be tied down by the limitations of traditional SAN and NAS architectures, so the on-demand scaling and ease of management offered by Isilon IQ is a perfect fit. We now have a core storage platform able to meet the diverse needs of our clients far into the future."

HEAnet operates two primary data centers serving Ireland’s academic communities equipped with hundreds of Windows and Linux servers, Flash media servers and two IBM Blue Gene supercomputers. Working with Isilon channel partner Tyrell, HEAnet deployed the Isilon IQ X-Series, featuring its OneFS operating system, to eliminate the performance and management challenges of its previous NAS system, accelerating data access and delivery across its network and improving Internet connectivity and reliability for Ireland’s many universities, institutes of technology and other educational communities. With Isilon scale-out NAS, HEAnet can scale performance and capacity on-demand without requiring even one full-time equivalent to manage the system, minimizing both capital and operational expenses to reduce total cost of ownership.

"All over the world, universities are looking to centralize valuable academic information to provide students with faster, more reliable access to the resources they need to learn and achieve," said Sam Grocott, vice president of marketing, Isilon Systems. "HEAnet is leading the way to a better educational experience by unifying its Internet services on Isilon scale-out NAS, demonstrating how Isilon’s unique ability to accelerate data access and delivery can help maximize the value of academic information for higher education."