University of Utah Installs Isilon 36NL NAS

EMC Corporation announced that
the University of Utah Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute (SCI) has
deployed EMC Isilon
scale-out NAS to power its Big Data-intensive workflows in biomedicine,
geophysics and other research areas.

The Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute is a permanent research
institute at the University of Utah directed by Professor Chris Johnson, the
Institute is now home to over 190 faculty, students, and staff and has
established itself as an leader in visualization,
scientific computing, and image analysis. The overarching research objective is
to create new scientific computing techniques, tools, and systems that enable
solutions to problems affecting various aspects of human life. A core focus of
the Institute has been biomedicine, but SCI Institute researchers also solve
challenging computational and imaging problems in such disciplines as
geophysics, combustion, molecular dynamics, fluid dynamics, and atmospheric
dispersion.

Due to an increase in new data files and processing requirements, SCI outgrew
the available capacity and performance of its previous storage system, which
slowed data access and limited research productivity. By implementing EMC
Isilon, SCI has unified a range of performance imaging and research
applications, as well its network of users’ home directories, onto a single,
shared storage platform, streamlining Big Data management to reduce IT costs
and accelerate time-to-discovery.

Customer Benefits:

• Linear scalability:  improved performance even as SCI added capacity, enabling the institute to stay
  ahead of user demand but under budget.
• Accelerated data access:  more than doubled performance over SCI’s previous system, enabling greater
  research productivity and new services for customers.
• Simplified IT management: reduced management to less than one full-time equivalent, enabling the SCI IT
  staff to work on research rather than managing storage systems.
• Increased returns from IT investment:
  accelerated research productivity and increased bandwidth for new
  services for less than SCI would have spent simply maintaining its old system in
  the same amount of time.

Customer Challenges and Solution:
When
selecting a new storage solution, EMC Isilon’s scalability was
important for SCI. Its IT acquisitions are funded by research grants so the IT
department is unable to plan ahead for when a SCI researcher receives a grant
and has a sudden need for more storage. The Isilon system’s ability to scale
performance and capacity makes it easy for SCI to grow the system organically.

Using the
Isilon 36NL, SCI supports more than 175 users across a wide range of workflows.
Since initially deploying Isilon, SCI’s home directory environment has doubled,
but despite the rapid data growth, the research group has not experienced any
performance issues. Isilon OneFS operating system and SmartQuotas application
simplified management to less than one full-time equivalent (FTE) and enabled
SCI’s IT department to focus on supporting the institute’s research, instead of
managing a slow and unreliable storage system.

Additionally,
SCI has unified its email storage and management onto the same Isilon
infrastructure. Prior to deploying EMC Isilon, SCI did not have the confidence
in its storage model to combine email traffic with other activities, as the SCI
Institute relies heavily on email and cannot tolerate any downtime. SCI now has
four 10 gigabyte connections into its compute cluster, with
two email servers that have direct access to the Isilon system.

Nick Rathke,
manager of IT, Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute said: "Our users were looking for double, even
triple the data access speeds, given the high-performance nature of their
scientific research and the need to accelerate time-to-results. It was clear we
needed something radically different to address our users’ needs. EMC Isilon
enabled us to build a next-gen storage infrastructure that we can simply and
reliably scale on demand. With Isilon, we’ve been able to accelerate research
productivity and provide new services to our customers for the same amount of
money we’d have spent over three years just maintaining our old system. Our
email is backed up to multiple nodes for reliability, we’re getting great
performance, and we don’t have to manage a separate email storage system
anymore."

Sam Grocott,
vice president of marketing, EMC Isilon said: "The University of Utah’s SCI Institute is playing a vital role in the
world of medicinal and geophysics research. This is crucial work that requires
a reliable and secure storage system capable of delivering consistently high performance
regardless of data growth demands. With EMC Isilon, SCI can stay ahead of user
demand while reducing both the cost and management requirements of its storage
environment."