Imperial College Opts for ArcaStream and Excelero

ArcaStream Ltd and Excelero Ltd said that their solutions were part of a new SDS storage deployment at Imperial College London, an university research centres for science, engineering, medicine and business.

By moving to a single storage infrastructure that integrates legacy and new resources, the college reduced storage complexity, increased agility in managing capacity and performance, and gained ROI. Backed by its new system, the university also improved usability, enacted a simpler and more cost-effective charge back policy, and embraced a future-proof approach to staying ahead of the continual multi-petabyte per year growth of their data holdings.

Expansion in Imperial College London’s Research Computing Services over the past decade had resulted in over 30 separate and independently managed islands of storage – silos that were difficult to access, manage and use. The group needed to enable researchers to access data with ease and speed, so they remain focused on their research projects – while integrating legacy and future compute systems and managing data throughout its life-cycle in line with regulatory compliance guidelines.

The new Research Data Store (RDS) is built around ArcaStream PixStor, a scalable storage platform based on IBM Spectrum Scale parallel file system, which combines flash, disk, tape, and cloud storage into a single name space. The infrastructure is geographically dispersed with a 5PB storage repository at a primary site and a secondary site for DR, served by PixStor with asynchronous replication and tiering to external storage targets. RDS also includes Excelero’s NVMesh, software that enables the sharing of NVMe flash storage resources across any network and supports any local or distributed file system. NVMesh provides a scalable NVMe tier for metadata performance. Users benefit from the performance of local flash with the convenience of centralised storage while reducing the storage TCO.

With this infrastructure, Imperial College London’s RDS simultaneously serves 2,000 existing HPC nodes and over 3,000 users with 20GB/s of throughput with no loss of interactive user performance.

“The usability of the systems for interactive use in particular has improved,” explains Matthew Harvey, RDS project lead and RCS manager, Imperial College. “Previously, there were frequent interruptions to interactive use because the file system load for some compute jobs effectively squeezed out users. Users would log into the system, type in their search criteria but it could take more than 10s to respond. Now that is a thing of the past.“

The new RDS supports a charge-back strategy where researchers cost-out storage as services on their grants – instead of charging users based on reserve capacity. More effective management of storage capacity also allowed the college to avoid costly additions. The ArcaStream platform provides tools and insight needed to understand the access patterns of data on the file system for each project allocation.

“This information governance is enabling us to store valuable data more intelligently and economically,” Harvey continued.

Excelero and ArcaStream showcased the performance and efficiency of their solutions at the ISC Event 2019, June 16-20 in Frankfurt, Germany.

Case Study ArcaStream Imperial College