ENGINEERING

Nexsan announced that Case Western Reserve University, one of the nation's leading, independent research universities, selected the NST5000 unified, hybrid storage system to meet its fast growing, high volume scientific computing storage needs. The Nexsan solution is now available campus-wide at Case and being used by multiple research groups at the school to support a variety of different data storage needs including imaging, data transfer, archiving and a high performance computing (HPC) cluster. The school is also expanding a VMware virtual server environment that will be supported with Nexsan.

Renowned for its scientific research programs, Case has seen exponential growth in its storage needs over the last four years, especially in the area of life sciences -- both in the School of Medicine and in the School of Engineering, where they conduct groundbreaking biomedical engineering research. These efforts involve large stores of raw research data, variable size stores of intermediate type data and small stores of results data. Data is produced from various types of instruments including microscopes, genetic sequencers, mass spectrometers and Nuclear Magnetic Resonance spectrometers.

"We have multiple research groups each using at least 10 TB and we are ready to support grant proposals requiring 100's of TB of primary storage in a single research project," said Brian Christian, senior technical lead in the Information Technology Services Design Group at Case Western Reserve University. "We just were not equipped to support that capacity or performance investment with our standard SAN and NAS."

Christian was tasked with finding a solution that could support 200 TB and scale all the way to a PetaByte of storage. Nexsan's NST5000 Unified Hybrid Storage system was recommended by his solution provider based on its ability to deliver exceptional performance without the capacity limitations and high price points of SSD-only solutions. Its patented caching acceleration technology intelligently optimizes caching by utilizing DRAM, NVRAM and flash-based solid state memory, along with spinning media, to multiply random I/O performance. The systems deliver true high performance for block and file data, sending both types of traffic through the NST5000 high-end solid-state based controllers. The results are high performance for both sequential and random I/O at prices near that of spinning disk systems alone.

"The Nexsan NST5000 was a perfect fit for our needs," added Christian. "It met all of our availability and reliability requirements. We can do rolling upgrades with no downtime and survive single points of failure. It offered the best price/performance of any solution we evaluated and it can grow and scale with us. Plus, it was available for use immediately vs. being on some vendor's product roadmap."

"There are lots of storage solutions that can meet high performance requirements for less than 30TB of data," said Victoria Grey, senior vice president, marketing, at Nexsan. "When you get to the types of requirements Case has, your viable options really narrow unless you have unlimited budget. This is where Nexsan really shines. Our NST5000 is delivering enterprise quality while meeting some very demanding capacity and performance requirements for Case at a price that is unmatched in the market."