Top US Universities Rely on Exablox

Exablox Corp. announced that US News and World Report’s top-ranked universities – including Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Johns Hopkins University and New York University – have deployed its OneBlox storage solution.

These universities rely on OneBlox to protect the data generated by their researchers and ensure that they get reliable access to the amounts of data is needed. Exablox’s scale-out, object-based storage system OneBlox, with CDP, keeps primary data safe and accessible by taking unlimited snapshots so users can restore information from any point in time. Recovery is fast and easy, typically taking one hundredth of the time that would be required to recover files through traditional backup/recovery methods. OneBlox’s CDP has zero performance overhead on the file system eliminating the need for traditional backup. With OneBlox also able to act as a backup target for Veeam, NetBackup, Commvault and others, Exablox provides universities a unified solution for multiple storage needs.

“With Exablox’s technology we’ve achieved a new level of data protection, scalability, and peace of mind,” says Brandon Savage, IT and network administrator, MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center. “We can’t recreate the data our researchers generate, and it needs to be stored in perpetuity, so data protection is absolutely critical for us. Not only are we protecting our VMware infrastructure with Veeam and OneBlox, we have been using OneBlox to protect departments’ primary research data. We’re now in the process of moving all our research data to OneBlox.“

Both scalability and data protection are mission-critical for universities, which are challenged to react to the growing generation of information and consumption of storage by students and researchers. Universities need instant recovery from failure, backup and recovery and protection from new threats such as ransomware. But they also need storage that is feature-rich, easy to manage, and affordable, so they can prioritize investment in R&D instead of IT administration.

OneBlox
Exablox’s product OneBlox is a cloud-managed, scale-out, object-based storage solution. It provides scalability, fast and self-service recovery, protection from CryptoLocker and other ransomware and advanced backup and recovery capabilities that may eliminate the need for traditional backup/recovery software.

OneBlox’s CDP enables universities to protect all of the primary storage written to OneBlox. CDP takes continuous snapshots of information so IT administrators can recover any individual file, folder or file share, rendering threats such as CryptoLocker obsolete. Alternatively, IT administrators can empower students or faculty to recover data on their own, which reduces the burden on resource-constrained IT administrators and enables users to get back to work.

OneBlox yields high deduplication and compression data reduction ratios, up to 20:1 or more by using inline variable-length deduplication and compression. This helps keep storage utilization under control when using OneBlox as a target for backup/recovery or archiving of the production data.

OneBlox’s scale-out architecture supports immediate allocation of cost-effective storage for researchers and students without reconfiguration. Universities can mix and match commodity-priced drive types (SATA, SAS) and capacity (1-8TB) within the same OneBlox and within a OneBlox Ring. In two minutes and with zero configuration, the new storage is available within the existing file system and is available to applications, researchers and students. Organizations can also consolidate primary storage (with CDP protection) and backup in the same storage pool.

“Research is core to the value of universities and it can’t be recreated,” says Shridar Subramanian, VP marketing, Exablox. “Reliable storage and protection is essential to ensure the R&D work that enables universities to win grants, build their reputation and attract students is always available.“