Case Western University Opts for Nexsan NST5000

Nexsan
Corporation announced that Case Western
Reserve University, an independent research
university, selected the NST5000 unified, hybrid storage system to meet its
growing, high volume scientific computing storage needs.

The Nexsan solution is available campus-wide at Case and being used by multiple
research groups at the school to support different data storage
needs including imaging, data transfer, archiving and a HPC cluster. The school
is also expanding a VMware virtual server environment that will be supported
with Nexsan.

Renowned for its scientific research
programs, Case has seen exponential growth in its storage needs over the last
four years, especially in the area of life sciences – both in the School of
Medicine and in the School of Engineering, where they conduct groundbreaking
biomedical engineering research. These efforts involve large stores of raw
research data, variable size stores of intermediate type data and small stores
of results data. Data is produced from various types of instruments including
microscopes, genetic sequencers, mass spectrometers and Nuclear Magnetic
Resonance spectrometers.

"We
have multiple research groups each using at least 10TB and we are ready to
support grant proposals requiring 100’s ofTB of primary storage in a single
research project," said Brian Christian, senior technical lead in the
IT Services Design Group at Case Western Reserve University. "We just were not equipped to support that
capacity or performance investment with our standard SAN and NAS."

Christian was tasked with finding a
solution that could support 200TB and scale all the way to a PB of storage.
NST5000 Unified Hybrid Storage system was recommended by his solution
provider based on its ability to deliver performance without the capacity
limitations and high price points of SSD-only solutions. Its patented caching
acceleration technology optimizes caching by utilizing DRAM, NVRAM and
flash-based solid state memory, along with spinning media, to multiply random
I/O performance. The systems deliver performance for block and
file data, sending both types of traffic through the NST5000 solid-state based controllers. The results are performance for both
sequential and random I/O at prices near that of spinning disk systems alone.

"The
Nexsan NST5000 was a perfect fit for our needs," added Christian.
"It met all of our availability and
reliability requirements. We can do rolling upgrades with no downtime and
survive single points of failure. It offered the best price/performance of any
solution we evaluated and it can grow and scale with us. Plus, it was available
for use immediately vs. being on some vendor’s product roadmap."

"There
are lots of storage solutions that can meet high performance requirements for
less than 30TB of data," said Victoria Grey, SVP, marketing, at
Nexsan. "When you get to the types
of requirements Case has, your viable options really narrow unless you have
unlimited budget. This is where Nexsan really shines. Our NST5000 is delivering
enterprise quality while meeting some very demanding capacity and performance
requirements for Case at a price that is unmatched in the market."