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ACCELERATE: ACADEMIC RESEARCH - Purdue University Delivers 900% Faster Access to Data, Delivering Accelerated Time to Results for 1,000 Researchers and 300 Projects with Powerful Storage and Advanced Caching Technology from DDN
Technology Category
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Storage Services
Applicable Industries
- Education
Applicable Functions
- Product Research & Development
- Discrete Manufacturing
Use Cases
- Predictive Maintenance
- Real-Time Location System (RTLS)
Services
- Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
- System Integration
The Challenge
Purdue University, a global leader in research, discovery, and innovation, faced the challenge of meeting the needs of up to 1,000 researchers working on several hundred projects. This drove the decision to deploy one large, centralized data repository powered by high-performance storage. The big data variety, velocity, and volume created the need for highly versatile, scalable storage. Diverse workloads required highly flexible storage to accommodate large parallel I/O jobs and many small, random read requests. The university initially looked at the needs of several top research areas, including computational nanotechnologies, aeronautical and astronomical engineering, mechanical engineering, genomics, structural biology, as well as several large projects in the life sciences disciplines. The challenge of managing varied research needs is accommodating both very large parallel I/O jobs and millions of small, random read requests without imposing performance penalties on anyone.
About The Customer
Purdue University is a global leader in research, discovery, and innovation. At the college’s West Lafayette, Ind., campus, more than 400 research laboratories and 140 university-approved research centers and institutes form a broad interdisciplinary research hub. Ranked No. 22 in the Best College Reviews of the top US research universities, Purdue is home to Discovery Park, a state-of-the-art facility with one-of-a-kind research and educational opportunities to catalyze and facilitate research breakthroughs for global impact. To fuel its multi-disciplinary research efforts, Purdue University has developed one of the nation’s largest campus cyberinfrastructures for research. Three of the university’s high-performance computing (HPC) systems are currently listed in the internationally known Top500® list, including the nation’s largest academic distributed computing grid and largest collection of science and medical online hubs. To ensure the highest levels of support for its various research initiatives, Purdue also has deployed a robust data repository, called the Data Depot.
The Solution
Purdue University implemented a centralized, high-performance storage solution for its Data Depot service, driven by DDN’s SFA12KX® storage platform with SFX. Additional sites use DDN EXAScaler® parallel file system appliance with SFX® cache acceleration. The university implemented a pair of DDN SFA 12KX high-performance storage systems with a total of 6.4PBs of raw storage capacity to provide block storage for the university’s GPFS parallel file system. Redundant storage arrays were installed in multiple campus data centers for maximum availability. Additionally, the university took advantage of DDN’s award-winning Storage Fusion Xcelerator (SFX) technology, which employs advanced caching technology to deliver unprecedented performance improvements. SFX uses storage acceleration tools that combine spinning and solid-state disk storage media with application-aware technology that enables storage systems to load data into system cache to accelerate both block and file-based data access.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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