Arizona State University’s Biodesign Research Institute Leverages DataCore SANsymphony-V

DataCore Software Corporation announced that the Biodesign Institute at Arizona State University (ASU), the second largest metropolitan university in the US, adopted a software-defined storage architecture by implementing its SANsymphony-V storage virtualization platform.

With the help of DataCore, the Biodesign Institute has increased application performance by up to five times, maximized storage capacity of existing investments, improved uptime and reduced costs by removing old storage controllers that had become high-maintenance and unaffordable.

“DataCore enables all the different storage devices that comprise our architecture to communicate and work with each other – even though they come from a wide mixture of vendors – thereby allowing the Institute to gain efficiencies and reduce our costs,” said Scott LeComte, senior IT manager, Arizona State University’s Biodesign Institute. “Just as important is the fact that DataCore’s software is portable and can reside in different locations, meaning we avoid a single point of failure by deploying two DataCore-powered nodes that operate synchronously, campus-wide and automatically can take over for each other in the event of a failure.“

The Biodesign Institute dedicates its research to addressing critical global challenges in healthcare, sustainability and security. The institute is made up of 14 different research centers, almost $60 million in annual research expenditures and more than 500 personnel who rely on the DataCore-powered storage infrastructure. Because the institute is so research-intensive, researchers are all required to save large amounts of data generated from experiments that have been conducted for long periods of time. The reason for doing so is that researchers are frequently called to ‘prove’ how they achieved a particular discovery – either by a federal agency, like the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), or by a third party company seeking to buy the research outright.

“When we first got DataCore, it was amazing how easily it fit into the environment and just worked. We are very pleased with just how seamless and non-disruptive the solution has been and its flexibility proves itself time and time again,” added LeComte.

By using DataCore, the institute’s IT team can pool all storage capacity and provide centralized oversight, provisioning and management to its entire storage architecture. The Biodesign Institute was able to expand its IT environment while cutting costs at the same time as it saw the total cost of supporting 1TB of storage decrease from $2,500/TB to $1,000/TB. SANsymphony-V currently manages more than 300TB of total, mirrored capacity.

“IT departments, especially at state-run institutions such as Arizona State, are constantly being tasked to find new ways to reduce cost, while ensuring that IT operations run smoothly,” said Steve Houck, COO, DataCore. “By creating a software-defined storage architecture based on SANsymphony-V, the Biodesign Institute at Arizona State was not only able to reduce costs, but increased application performance by up to five times as well.” 

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