DDN Chosen by University College London

University College London  (UCL), ranked consistently as a top-five university
worldwide, has selected DataDirect Networks, Inc.
(DDN) to provide up to 3,000 researchers with a safe and resilient storage
solution for sharing, reusing and preserving project-based research data.

With 25 Nobel Prize
winners among its alumni and staff as well as a world-class reputation for the
quality of its teaching and research, UCL sought to remove the burden of
storing and preserving research data from individual researchers and in doing
so, lower the barriers of sharing and exploiting vital findings in order to
improve research outcomes and overcome problems of global significance.

As UCL’s storage demands grow, the university expects to build a storage
foundation that will scale up to 100PB. Looking for a storage solution that was
massively scalable yet simple to manage as part of the first phase of the
infrastructure build out, UCL will use DDN object storage technology to store
up to 600TB of research data.

DDN object storage capabilities also will be able to empower UCL researchers to
collaborate without having to worry about data reliability, compliance
obligations or long-term retention of critical research assets.

With DDN WOS distributed object storage architecture, GRIDScaler parallel file
storage system and tight integration with the Integrated Rule-Oriented Data
Management Solution (iRODS), UCL forecasts it will save up to hundreds of
thousands of UK pounds by slashing hardware, power and staffing costs, as well
as maintenance fees, associated with attaining and maintaining personal data
stores across 100 departments, institutes and research centers.

DDN Delivers Performance Storage
without Complexity
Faced with the need to accommodate all types of research data of varying
velocity and growth rates, UCL wanted to consolidate storage and minimize the
cost, administration and compliance risks of individual researchers maintaining
standalone removable HDDs and USB drives containing critical research data.

Additionally, given UCL’s congested, expensive downtown London location,
power and space efficiency was critical which made a high-density storage
architecture essential to the university.

Rather than taking an approach that limited application access and scale, UCL
selected the combination of DDN’s distributed WOS and GRIDScaler technology to
provide the desired scalability, performance, reliability, portability and
management simplicity.

With DDN WOS storage technology, UCL also expects to better meet increasingly
stringent compliance requirements for the management and preservation of
research data as required by the UK Research Councils and other UK funding
bodies.

DDN’s track record of supporting massive research initiatives and
diverse academic environments was a consideration in the final
decision as UCL wanted a partner that understood the differences between
corporate and academic worlds, including the importance of delivering
a solution researchers would embrace and use.

Dr. J. Max Wilkinson, head of research data services for University College
London’s information services division, said: "We were very interested in building a relationship with a strong
storage partner to fill our technology gap. After a thorough assessment, DDN
met our technical requirements and shared our storage vision. In evaluating
DDN, we agreed that the WOS solution had a simple proposition, was high
performance and had low administration overhead. DDN is empowering us to
deliver performance and cost savings through a dramatically simplified
approach. Add in the fact that DDN’s resilient, extensible storage technology
provided evidence for seamless expansion from a half-petabyte to 100PBs, and we
found exactly the foundation we were looking for."

Dr. Daniel Hanlon, storage architect for research data services in University
College London’s information services division, said: "It was important that DDN’s solution gave us
multiple ways to access the same storage so we could be compatible with
existing application codes. The tendency with other solutions was to give us
bits of technology that had been developed in different spaces and that didn’t
really fit our problem. We wanted to work with a storage solution provider that
took advantage of open-source solutions. This enables us to partner not just
with DDN but and also with other academic institutions."

Ashish Nadkarni,
research director, IDC, said: "For
2013, IDC anticipates object storage growing faster than any other segment in
the file-and-object storage market. A driver in the growth of private cloud
adoption is the control over data security and resiliency users get compared to
public clouds. As more companies look at object storage for collaborative file
sharing, archive and backup, IDC is seeing an acceleration in cloud adoption.
UCL is a great example of this mainstream private cloud adoption of object
storage for collaborative file sharing."