DDN Chosen by Aalto University

DataDirect Networks, Inc. (DDN) announced that Aalto University has deployed DDN’s SFA12KX  and Lustre storage solutions to support the growth of its data-intensive research.

Deployed with six HPE ProLiant DL360 Gen9 servers, the joint DDN storage and HPE server solution delivers 4x more capacity and 5x more performance than the university’s prior system.

“DDN’s advanced big storage platforms give us the data-handling functionality, capacity and accelerated access times that our research teams require, plus they integrate seamlessly with our HPE servers to deliver a powerful storage and compute solution,” said Mikko Hakala, doctor of technology, Aalto University. “The solution’s scale and robust capabilities are essential to Aalto as our research data has grown tenfold within the last four years. This growth is due partly to the data intensity of the digital economy and the Internet of Things, as well as to the fact that we serve the broad academic community and collaborate with other organizations and universities, both in Finland and abroad.“

Based in Finland, Aalto University was founded in 2010 when Helsinki University of Technology, the Helsinki School of Economics and the University of Art and Design Helsinki were merged. The collaboration among the scientific, business and arts communities within the university fosters multi-disciplinary education and research, including hundreds of active data-intensive research projects in areas such as physics, computer science, neuroscience, economics and signal processing. With an aging storage environment, the university needed to modernize its storage to support the needs of its research teams and the rapid growth in the volume of research data.

With the DDN and HPE solution, Aalto University can transfer data efficiently between its supercomputer and the storage system. The supercomputer has a high utilization rate, and the joint system provides capacity and power for production environments as well as extreme scalability and tools for managing the stored data.

The DDN SFA12KX is purpose-built to simplify and tame big data growth, enabling organizations such as Aalto University to architect and scale their environments more efficiently and cost effectively. The SFA12KX fuses IO/s and bandwidth performance with capacity management, and derives peak performance out of compute investments with its I/O infrastructure and multi-media disk drives that maximize system performance and lower storage investment costs.

“The DDN storage system has functioned flawlessly and provides Aalto University ample performance and capacity for the coming years,” added Hakala.