Cornell University Chooses Red Hat Storage

Red Hat, Inc.
a provider of open source solutions, announced that
the Cornell University Institute for Biotechnology and Life Science
Technologies is using Red Hat Storage, formally Gluster, technology to manage
data-intensive research projects.

With Red Hat Storage Software Appliance, the department is experiencing cost-effective,
highly available and scalable storage, and using it for such projects as DNA
sequencing. It has delivered flexibility and reliability that has allowed the institute to achieve the growth needed to continue its research programs, while
increasing researcher productivity due to the high availability of the data.

"The Institute for
Biotechnology and Life Science Technologies brings together a diverse group of
university scientists conducting research in biology and the physical,
engineering and computational sciences, which produces extremely large amounts
of data," said Steven Lee, Cornell Center for Advanced Computing
systems consultant.

Producing over 15 to 20 terabytes of storage a month, the Institute
required a solution to provide elastic scaling capabilities while being highly
available and capable of handling large amounts of data output at any given
time. Prior to Red Hat Storage, the Institute’s standard file systems capped at
8 and 16 terabytes per node, which required significant work-arounds; it needed
a storage solution that would facilitate access to all data in every node.
Therefore, a global namespace was a necessity. Additionally, as a software
solution, Red Hat Storage added value to Cornell’s existing
infrastructure.

"The idea of a scale-out
storage solution was something we’d always been interested in, but never could
implement due to cost," said James VanEe, IT director of Cornell’s
Institute for Biotechnology and Life Science Technologies. "With Red Hat Storage we are able to avoid
significant costs with a cost-efficient software solution, while keeping our
infrastructure in place. It enables us to scale easily and affordably without
affecting our system’s performance. One of my main goals as IT director is to
create an environment where new technologies can be quickly adopted. Red Hat
Storage helps us stay ahead of the curve and is flexible enough to fit in with
new technologies."

With Red Hat Storage Software Appliance, the Cornell Institute for
Biotechnology and Life Science Technologies was able to lay the technology on
its already existing disks, avoiding the potential high cost of deploying
additional servers and storage hardware. With the elastic scaling capabilities
provided by Red Hat Storage, the Institute removed the constraint and pain
point of trying to manage unstructured data.

"Cornell was faced with a
huge challenge; they needed HA and scalability without using a large portion of
the IT budget," said Ranga Rangachari, general manager, Storage at Red
Hat. "Red Hat Storage delivers the
access their researchers need for data availability and the scalability to
accommodate data growth at a cost that meets business needs."

Red Hat Storage Software Appliance lets enterprises deploy storage
the same way they deploy computing today -as a virtualized, commoditized and
scale-on-demand pool, improving storage economics. Combined with the customer’s
choice of  commodity computing and storage resources, Red Hat Storage can
scale-out to petabytes of capacity and GB/s of throughput at a lower cost than
proprietary systems. It offers HA with n-way replication both
within and between public and private datacenters. It is deployable both on-premise (as a virtual appliance or bare-metal
software appliance) and in public clouds such as Amazon Web Services. Red Hat Storage is the primary author and maintainer of the open source
GlusterFS software.