University of Cambridge Has Selected Reldata

RELDATA Inc. announced  that the University of Cambridge, one of the world’s oldest universities and leading academic centers, has selected RELDATA to support the rapidly growing storage environment of its Geography Department. The department expects its storage requirements to more than double, from 30 terabytes to 64 terabytes, over the next three years. Cambridge has deployed RELDATA’s unified storage solution to ensure future scalability as well as flexible storage provisioning for its faculty, students and staff who have different computing software requirements.

The University of Cambridge is Europe’s fourth-oldest educational institution with notable alumni such as Sir Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Steven Hawking, John Maynard Keynes and most of the Monty Python comedy troupe. The Geography Department, first established in 1888, is a flourishing world-class research center with an expanding academic community comprised of approximately 100 staff and researchers, plus 550 students. Its research is organized into different groups including Spaces of Economy and Society, Environmental Processes, Historical and Cultural Geography, Glacial and Quaternary Processes and Society, Environment and Development. In addition to Microsoft Office, email and internet applications, the department is using complex, data-intensive software for geographical information systems that involve image processing, data gathering and analysis, numerical modeling and environmental simulation. Its computing environment is supported by a mix of Linux and Windows servers, virtualized via Citrix XenServer.

Supporting the department’s research projects requires a rapidly expanding pool of storage, along with the need to keep data accessible for a wide range of business, administrative and technical applications. Recently, the department determined that a solution was needed to cost-effectively scale capacity to support future user requirements. The key goal was to easily and rapidly expand its storage while gaining flexible access to storage space. Following an evaluation period, the department selected RELDATA’s iSCSI-based solution because it offers affordable Ethernet access to storage, an easy-to-use single management interface, and the ability to scale to larger systems without incremental licensing costs through a unique Save As You Grow software licensing model. The ability to run on the department’s existing network without additional infrastructure changes or associated costs offered a clear advantage over a Fibre Channel SAN.

"We looked for a solution that had the topology to meet our current requirements but would map to future growth. What we got with RELDATA was a solution that allows us to both scale cost-effectively and provision storage more efficiently to a wide range of users – whether they’re using a sophisticated modeling and simulation program or general business applications," said Mike Bithell, assistant director of research in computing, Geography Department, University of Cambridge. "RELDATA’s solution has also proven to be very robust and stable, which means we don’t have to waste time fixing crashes and managing problems."

Built from the ground up, the RELDATA Unified Storage platform is based on an open, software-centric architecture that delivers superior performance for storage consolidation within complex multi-vendor and virtualized server environments. RELDATA’s Unified Storage Engine (USE) leverages the iSCSI fabric to manage block and file environments more cost-effectively than with Fibre Channel (FC) alternatives. It provides mid-size and remote enterprises with significant benefits compared to alternative FC networks including ease of implementation and simplified storage management that results in significant cost savings.

“Like many mid-size organizations, the University of Cambridge faces the real challenge of how to build out and meet its storage requirements, now and in the future, in an efficient, economical manner,” said Steven Murphy, CEO, RELDATA. “We are pleased to have passed their exam, based on thorough research of alternative solutions. The best validation is through customers and this is further proof that our unified storage solutions are delivering value.”