University of Ottawa Medical Research Selects Isilon

EMC Corporation announced that the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Ottawa, an internationally recognized leader in medical research, has deployed EMC Isilon scale-out NAS to provide a storage environment that enables and empowers its staff to accelerate the advancement of medicine.

Like many organizations, the world-class microbiology and pathology facility needed to address capacity and performance challenges related to big data growth while also taking advantage of the opportunities big data creates. To transition its storage infrastructure so that it could meet these needs, the Faculty of Medicine turned to scale-out NAS.

Customer benefits:

• Productivity and efficiency: In the past, research was often limited by the amount of storage available to researchers. With Isilon, the Faculty of Medicine can now provide each individual researcher with up to 250GB of storage capacity, 10 times the previous allocation with the option of adding more at the low, one-time cost of $1 per GB. No longer hindered by storage limitations, researchers can focus on pushing the envelope on medical breakthroughs.
• Performance: Isilon performance scaled in lockstep with the Faculty of Medicine's data-intensive storage demands. Performance increased 400% as the Faculty of Medicine scaled out its new infrastructure.
• Plug and play: Since the Faculty of Medicine's IT team (Medtech) could 'set it and forget it' with the Isilon X-series, the 22-person team decreased storage management time and reallocated its resources to focus on more critical or forward-looking services.
• Improved file access: With Isilon SnapShotIQ, researchers access and recover files from their home, office, iPad or any computer within the Faculty of Medicine from 90 days back, three times longer than the previous time allotment.

Customer Challenges and Solution:

The research wing of the Faculty of Medicine foresaw the need for increased capacity requirements and tasked its Medtech experts to evaluate the department's needs, to anticipate how much storage would be required in future years, and to develop a three-to-five-year plan for storage. After interviewing faculty staff, Medtech consistently found that the biggest needs were for more capacity and the ability to recover data for longer than 30 days back.

Previously, the Faculty of Medicine was using a tier one storage system for all of its research storage needs. The expense of running this system became a burden on the IT department, which had to limit 80 research groups to only 25GB of data each. Even if researchers wanted to pay more for additional storage, the Faculty of Medicine didn't have the infrastructure to provide it.

The University of Ottawa selected Isilon because of its scalability, file recovery, easy provisioning and an architecture that enabled rapid sharing of common resources.

Since implementing the new solution, the Faculty of Medicine has been able to eliminate the storage restraints that had hindered its researchers. Individual researchers are each allotted 250GB of storage - 10X the previous amount - with the ability to purchase more. Using Isilon SnapShotIQ, researchers can recover and access files from any computer for up to 90 days. The scale-out NAS architecture has also allowed the research department to improve storage performance by 400%.

The ability to provision storage within minutes was critical because the Faculty of Medicine's research staff often needs large amounts of storage capacity provided upon request, and Isilon made it easy to meet these demands. The system also enabled research groups to share TBs worth of image and video data, empowering researchers with information they did not have access to prior to Isilon's deployment. Medtech was able to accomplish these feats and more without adding a dedicated storage person to the staff.

Jean-Ray Arseneau, service manager, University of Ottawa Faculty of Medicine, said: "The Faculty of Medicine at the University of Ottawa is dedicated to groundbreaking medical research. With EMC Isilon, the storage boundaries have been blown wide open - we can for the first time, now scale our storage as research needs it, based on research demands."