National University of Singapore Opts for Qsan

Company biography
Founded in 1905, National University of Singapore (NUS) is a public university in Singapore and is considered one of the most highly-ranked academic institutions.

As a global university centered in Asia, NUS takes an integrated and multi-disciplinary approach to research, working with partners from industry, government, and academia to address complex issues relevant to Asia and the world.

It has 30 university-level research institutes and centres, and research centres of excellence cover a range of themes including energy, environmental and urban sustainability, treatment and prevention of diseases common among Asians, active ageing, advanced materials, risk management, and resilience of financial systems.

The university’s latest research focus uses data sciences, optimization research and cyber security to support Singapore’s Smart Nation initiative.

For more than 100 years on, it has been Asia’s flagship university.

Challenge
NUS adopts legacy server storage with open-source Linux to store their data, but is short of data protection mechanism and regular patches. As they are generating raw image files from their research and share in NFS, and supporting deep learning/ML through iSCSI, they require a reliable and powerful storage solution for massive research data storing also hyper computing works. In some cases, they store raw image files in large sizes through overnight experiments and would need to secure the best data integrity over tons of read/write operation from researchers.

Solution: 

• Data Security
• Business Backup

Responding to the gradual growth of research data scale and application scenario in NUS labs, Taknet System Pte Ltd recommended Qsan XN8024R to furnish pressing requirement of huge capacity, and top security to NUS.

Besides scalability with Qsan expansion units, XN8024R is capable of supporting almost unlimited sizes of single files, and many enterprise-grade features as thin provision and inline de-dupe to optimize overall capacity utilization.

With the combination of high-speed SSDs and high-capacity HDDs, the labs are able to run ML and deep learning tasks over XN8024R at the same time.

As data security and integrity are the main concerns over confidential research data, NUS is satisfied with WORM function and SED support to ensure the high data protection mechanism.

Benefits
Qsan provides NAS with enterprise-grade data protection and utilised ZFS features.

• Recommended Product: XCubeNAS 8000
• Recommended Models: XN8024R

Recommended Features:

• WORM
• SED Support
• Storage Scalability

“We are impressed by the reliability and scalability XN8024R offered. Those enterprise-grade features built-in have supported our research development for years,” said IT lab manager, NUS.