British Army Selects GB Labs FastNAS

GB Labs Limited has provided a NAS infrastructure, installed at the British Army HQ in Andover by GB Labs distributor AGX Holdings Ltd.

The FastNAS installation supplements an existing GB Labs storage network at the site, extending the capacity, agility and flexibility.

The storage network is used by the Army photographic team: it runs alongside an existing FastNAS cluster used by its design team. The redundant installation provides secure storage for both work in progress and archive, supporting numbers of concurrent users.

FastNAS is built on 3 key technologies from GB Labs: the Velocity RAID engine controls and manages the disk array; Nitro the acceleration tool which provides a speed boost; and Blueshift, which enables the specialist architecture of FastNAS to sit on a conventional network and deliver to clients over standard protocols.

This is vital in this implementation, as it allows the Army teams to connect their preferred design and image processing software to the powerful store and archive.

The GB Labs installation at Andover includes 3 fully mirrored 64TB disk arrays, connected over a 10GbE network. The main FN16 production server delivers sustained data rates of 2.5Gb/s with the backup and archive server running at 2.0Gb/s.

“FastNAS is a unique product, which combines dedicated hardware and industry-leading software to manage in detail the process of reading and writing large amounts of data to disk,” said Dominic Harland, CEO and CTO, GB Labs. “This ensures fast, consistent and extremely reliable storage for large data files and large numbers of users. This project has significantly upgraded the agility, as well as the capacity, supporting the vital work of these 2 critical parts of the British Army, and we are pleased to have been able to work with them to achieve their goals.“

The storage system for the photographic team was delivered and installed in January 2022.