NEC Provides 3PB Solution for French Brain & Spine Institute

NEC Europe Ltd. announced is providing neuro-scientists at the Institut du Cerveau et de la Moelle Épinière (ICM), the French Brain & Spine Institute in Paris, a three petabyte storage solution to store research data generated by neuro and cellular imaging.

The ICM aims to understand the causes behind major nervous system disorders and offer new treatments through the collaboration of over 600 researchers. To do this, it must provide these researchers with a robust technical infrastructure capable of managing securely immense amounts of data in order to carry out their research.

"One of the key objectives of the IT team at the ICM was to ensure that the technical infrastructure – and in particular data storage – should not be a hindrance to research," said Bruno Lecointe, Sales Manager, NEC. "NEC, along with its partner Active Circle, enabled the IT team to provide a massive-capacity, three-petabyte-storage solution that meets this objective and is fully redundant, secure and cost-effective."

The ICM selected a software solution from Active Circle that was integrated with an intelligent SAS/SATA-based, high-end solution from NEC. It provides – cost effectively – a high level of reliability and data protection.

"We selected the high-performance computing solution proposed by NEC and Active Circle because they demonstrated an excellent level of cooperation; they listened to our requirements and proposed a solution that met our needs and expectations," said Dominque Bayle, Chief Information Officer of the ICM.

The NEC solution has an enterprise-class, cable-less system design that includes redundant, hot-swapped controllers, power and cooling units. The system components are monitored using industry-standard protocols to ensure continuous operation in case of failure or component malfunction.

The solution included RAID storage systems from Promise Technology equipped with Serial ATA (SATA) hard disk drives configured within RAID-6 disk arrays. Serial attached SCSI host interfaces in ‘redundant ‘No Single Point of Failure’ system architecture meet high-load requirement of input/output operations (IOPs). This combination of enterprise-class RAID storage systems with a cost-effective, 24×7-proven, SATA hard disk provides the required performance and capacity ratio.

The Active Circle software is installed on all storage nodes as a clustered file storage system with integrated security and tiered storage management. This software solution is compatible with standard hardware and well adapted to the management of large volumes of data. It natively protects against errors, corruption and disasters and allows for the implementation of a multi-tiered storage architecture.