University of Utah’s Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute Chooses Qumulo Data-Aware Scale-Out NAS

Qumulo, Inc., in data-aware scale-out NAS, announced that The University of Utah’s Scientific Computing and Imaging (SCI) Institute has chosen its Core for increased performance and analytics necessary to make smarter decisions about data management.

Qumulo demonstrated its Core software at SC15 on Nov. 16-19 in Austin, TX.

The University of Utah’s SCI Institute is an internationally recognized facility specializing in visualization, scientific computing and imaging analysis. The institute’s massive data files and performance compute cluster demanded an equally performance storage solution that could deliver large, shared single pool capacity, multiple parallel processing paths and visibility necessary to understand what was happening with all that data.

To meet its needs, the SCI Institute implemented the QC24 hybrid storage solution from Qumulo, which delivers real-time analytics that provide visibility into data usage and storage across flexible, fast and highly scalable commodity hardware.

“Other vendors claim to ‘scale up’ storage, but there’s a fundamental difference with Qumulo: the ability to linearly scale capacity and performance at the same time,” said Nick Rathke, assistant director of IT, The SCI Institute. “Every time I add a node, I’m adding network bandwidth and I/O operations, not just a tray of disks, and that’s critical for us.”

The move to Qumulo was a success, slashing processing times from months to just days-and software enhancements delivered through Qumulo’s agile two-week development and release methodology are shortening those processing times even further, as is the performance improvement each time a node is added to the Qumulo cluster. This ability to scale I/O performance is a critical enhancement to the SCI Institute’s productivity, allowing the central storage cluster to finally keep pace with the performance of the HPC server cluster.

But the real eye-opener for Rathke was Qumulo’s real-time data analytics, which provided instant visibility needed to bring users into a conversation about storage resources.

“It’s impossible to make smart decisions about data when your storage is a figurative black box,” said Rathke. “Qumulo lets me tell in an instant how the data is used, who touches it and how often, so storage is no longer a technical issue but a management decision.“

Additionally, throughout the implementation process, the Care dedicated customer support team worked in lock-step with Rathke’s group to ensure smooth deployment and growth. “Their flexibility and willingness to help us make the right decisions – not just up front, but going forward – has been key to keeping us on track,” concluded Rathke.

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