EMC Isilon Deployed by University at Buffalo

EMC Corporation announced that the University at Buffalo has deployed EMC Isilon scale-out NAS to power its Center for Computational Research, providing a wide range of researchers and academic investigators access to a single, high-performance, shared storage resource.

Using Isilon’s X-Series, powered by the OneFS operating system, the Center has consolidated its high-performance computing applications, as well as its research-based home directories and file shares, onto a single point of management, simplifying its IT infrastructure to increase efficiency and reliability. With Isilon, the Center can scale performance and capacity in lockstep with the intense demands of its big data computing environment, improving research productivity, while minimizing costs.

"We operate 24x7x365, so downtime and performance bottlenecks are simply unacceptable," said Tony Kew, Storage Administrator, University at Buffalo Center for Computational Research. "Plus, we support hundreds of researchers with limited IT staff, so we need storage that’s simple to manage and easy to scale. Isilon delivers on all fronts, while also providing highly concurrent performance to accelerate our research."

The University at Buffalo’s Center for Computational Research provides high performance cluster computing resources to the entire university, providing computing, network and storage resources for projects ranging from bioinformatics to geohazards. Using Isilon’s X-Series, the Center consolidated its high-performance computing applications, home directories and research-based file shares on a single, shared storage resource, simplifying big data management to improve application performance and research productivity. With Isilon’s SmartQuotas application, the Center can seamlessly provision its Isilon cluster among various research groups and projects, improving data access and resource utilization to drive increased operating efficiency.

"The University at Buffalo is setting the standard in not only academic research, but the use of next-generation IT to more quickly extract insight from big data," said Sam Grocott, vice president of marketing, Isilon. "By using Isilon to power its big data computational research initiatives, the university is demonstrating the compelling productivity and efficiency benefits possible with scale-out NAS in data-intensive environments."