ACADEMIA
RAID Inc. selected by University of Utah
HPC Center increases productivity and decreases cost, while increasing availability and scalability: RAID Inc., a customized storage solutions and services provider specializing in leading edge technologies, today announced it is working with the University of Utah’s Center for High Performance Computing to provide customized, scalable and cost-effective storage solutions to support their growing data storage libraries. Providing large-scale computer systems, networking and expertise to support the computational requirements of individual colleges and departments, the University of Utah’s High Performance Computing center had accumulated over 60 Linux servers which hosted all storage internally. Over time, this type of storage configuration which included disparate drive sizes, operating systems and versions, software and RAID card drivers, grew increasingly difficult to manage. The HPC Center’s existing “turnkey solution”, initially implemented to save time and money, began to drain resources and the center realized it needed to deploy a storage system that could scale over time and could be easily managed and maintained from a centralized vendor. After evaluating several options, including the development of an in-house solution or going with a larger, Tier-1 vendor, The University of Utah chose RAID Inc.’s Magellan solution due to its scalability and custom implementation. A SAN configuration using SATA-2 disk, the solution offered the flexibility to meet the HPC center’s unique storage needs and provide centralized services for easy management, configuration and recovery of the center’s 120 TB of stored data. “One of the main reasons we chose RAID Inc. as our storage provider is so we have a resource to lean on when problems creep up”, said Brian Haymore, Lead Computation Cluster Administrator. “We needed a solutions provider that would provide us with customized solutions and personalized attention; we didn’t want to be viewed as ‘just another customer’ but rather a partner that could rely on its vendor to explore issues and needs. The success of our relationship really stems around the level of expertise that RAID brings to the table and how that expertise allows us to provide computing support to the various professors, departments and research laboratories on campus that rely on us for storage capacity and bandwidth.” “Our customized approach really stands out from other solutions when we are able to offer customers like the University of Utah a storage system that takes into consideration not only their immediate needs, but their storage requirements down the line,“ said Bob Picardi, COO of RAID Inc. “Because of this approach, we are very attractive to customers in the high performance computing space who require specially designed systems, in addition to a partner, that can work with them to make adjustments to their storage deployment on an as-needed basis.”