"If there's one single feature of the ONStor solution that stands out over the other solutions we reviewed it is the powerful and flexible scalability."

Stephen Mounsey, IT Systems Manager Cambridge University Engineering Department

The company:

The University of Cambridge is one of the oldest universities in the world and one of the largest in the United Kingdom consisting of over 100 departments, faculties and schools. The university’s Engineering Department employs nearly 400 staff (academic and support), has about 1100 undergraduate students and around 600 postgraduate students and postdoctoral researchers. It is the largest department in the University and accounts for about 10% of the entire institutions research and teaching activity.

The challenge:

The key storage issues that led the Engineering Department to search for a new solution were the lack of resilience in its existing Windows/Unix infrastructure combined with the management costs and lack of scalability of this environment. Its other requirements included improved 24/7 access and security.

Most file serving had previously been based on standard Unix servers with JBOD storage. Two years prior to the selection, the department had implemented a RAID array for the central fileserver, a standard Unix NFS/Samba fileserver and maintenance with very high upgrade costs. Owing to capacity constraints the department was unable to provide sensible file quotas to research users. The decision was made by the IT Services Group to replace the ageing system and invest in a modern and efficient storage solution.

In order to improve the current storage facility, the department’s IT leaders were looking for increased data integrity and reliability, improved performance and manageability, scalable capacity and finally improved data recovery. Cost was also a significant driver in the selection process with strict budgetary restrictions in place along with reliability and ease of deployment, the ability to adhere to installation deadlines and business stability of the supplier.

There was a rigid selection process with the department looking at EMC, BlueArc, NetApp, and Isilon along side ONStor.

The solution:

The department selected The ONStor/Infortrend solution, which allows it to provide all users with appropriate amounts of home directory storage with much greater resilience than before.

ONStor was chosen for its product base, the quality of design and manufacture of the products and because the company had a sensible business model and would represent a stable future partner.

The department invested in two Bobcat 2240’s, with 18 Terabytes of storage at an additional cost. This solution would be used to serve applications for the home directory and shared file-space for research, teaching and administration and applications serving to Unix systems.

The central storage infrastructure used in the department is ONStor NAS with Infortrend SATA disc array mirrored between two sites and backups to the Overland LTO3 tape library.

The main site server provides home directory services to the whole department for students and staff, as well as applications serving and administrative file access. Both NFS and CIFS protocols are used.The remote (West Cambridge) site server provides local home directory and group filespace for users at that site, as well as being a mirror target for the main site (and vice versa). Backups are situated at the main site.

The benefits:

Several benefits have been realised since implementation. Firstly the department has seen much improvement in the management of the information; secondly there has been an obvious reduction in downtime, alongside an improved resilience, improved performance and above all a much higher storage capacity with the all-important option for further scalability.

In the future, the Department plans to invest in additional, high performance storage and the addition of gateway nodes to provide true high availability.