University of Oslo Opts for HDS, QStar and Spectra Logic

Spectra Logic Corp. and QStar Technologies Inc. announced that the University of Oslo has selected a Spectra Logic T-Finity coupled with QStar’s Archive Manager 6.0 to upgrade its storage systems as part of the NorStore project, where the country’s research community benefits from a government-funded storage infrastructure.

With a requirement for 24/7, easy access to large volumes of scientific data, storage reliability is paramount to the University.

NorStore is a Norwegian national storage project designed to provide the Norwegian research community from all universities, university colleges and research organizations with a centralized storage infrastructure, hosted by the University of Oslo. Financed by the Research Council of Norway and the participating centers, the infrastructure must provide easy and secure access to distributed storage resources, facilitate the creation and use of digital scientific repositories, provide large aggregate capacities for storage and data transfer, and optimize the utilization of the overall storage capacity.

Founded in 1811, the University of Oslo is Norway’s largest and oldest institution of higher education. It has over 27,000 students and 5,900 staff and the University Center for IT Services (USIT) employs over 250 people to support its IT infrastructure, which includes 12,000 Windows PCs, 1,500 Mac clients, 1,000 Linux clients, 300 Windows servers, 1,500 Unix/Linux servers and associated systems such as SANs and backup applications.

USIT staff was finding that the capacity and flexibility of the legacy storage no longer met the university’s requirements for the NorStore project. The system comprised of solutions that, as time passed, ran older architectures that were challenging and costly to run due to vendor fragmentation, expiring support contracts, frequent hardware failures and expensive and impractical offline requirements for routine maintenance. Furthermore, the unrelenting growth in data from scientific activities was putting additional pressure on the ageing system.

The university needed a new storage infrastructure that would offer consolidation, management centralization, performance and flexibility, as well as scalability, within its budget constraints.

Lars Oftedal, IT director at the university, explained the selection process: “We looked at several bids but found that the Spectra Logic and QStar solution would not only meet all our initial criteria but also provide compatibility with iRODS*. The Spectra Logic T-Finity library and QStar Archive Manager have saved us on several fronts including development and financial costs.”

The installation process and setup were straight forward and had only negligible impact on daily operations.

The infrastructure includes:

• HDS Unified Storage and performance NAS systems:
  
  • 4 Hitachi Unified Storage VM Controllers
  • I cluster of performance NAS (HNAS 3090) with two nodes initially
  • 4PB of primary storage
  • 4Brocade switches
  • Everything including management delivered in 9 racks

• Spectra Logic T-Finity:
  
  • Three frame configuration and 918 slots
  • 4 TS1140 technology drives
  • 3.6PB capacity (of which 3PB for NorStore)

• QStar:
  
  • 4x2TB disks for cache
  • NAS presentation of tape resource

Oftedal added: “The Spectra Logic T-Finity tape library gives us up to 4 PB of capacity initially, and we expect this to be quickly allocated. For us, data preservation and bit corruption detection and correction are critical and the combination of Hitachi, QStar and Spectra Logic has allowed us to tick these boxes while remaining within budget.”

The T-Finity has a design that offers scalability with the performance necessary to meet the requirements of data-intensive environments. It redefines what customers should expect from modern tape archive and backup solutions, with significant CapEx and OpEx savings.

To help the University of Oslo preserve their data, T-Finity offers a suite of standard data integrity verification features that allow them to check data already written to tape. It also incrementally scales to 3.6EBs of compressed capacity with TS1140 technology tape drives. This capacity can be stored without giving up the density and ease of management that are hallmarks of Spectra enterprise libraries.

The QStar clustered servers provide an active passive configuration as deployed by the University of Oslo. Data is staged to a disk cache, also part of the previously mentioned Hitachi HUS-VM system, and gives the user the ability to store to tape through a NAS-like NFS interface. Frequently accessed archived files are available from the disk cache and older less frequently accessed content is automatically retrieved from the T-Finity library. Users are deciding on the number of tape copies to be created, whether one, two or more, to meet their individual needs and budgets. USIT is taking advantage of TDO, QStar’s proprietary file system, to benefit from near 100% media utilization.