Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology Taps Dell Compellent

Japan Advanced Institute of Science
and Technology (JAIST) has selected Dell
Compellent arrays to provide performance and large capacity
storage for its growing, private cloud environment that supports its students
and researchers.

With initial available capacity of 3PB, the new storage infrastructure is
one of the world’s largest Dell Compellent implementations. The new
Compellent infrastructure will enable JAIST to access information and protect large amounts of important research data.

The new storage arrays will bolster the
storage capabilities of FRONTIER (FRONT Information EnviRonment), a campus IT
platform constructed to support advanced teaching and research activities at
JAIST, which specializes in graduate-level education and research. JAIST is
strengthening their IT environment to help further advance its world-class
research.

As the core of this system, a private cloud environment is being
implemented with the aim to improve convenience for users and help achieve low
cost, energy efficiency and streamlined management by centralizing
hardware resources.

"With
advancements to the Dell Fluid Data architecture and the enterprise
capabilities of Dell Compellent storage arrays, an increasing number of
customers are turning to Dell for large-scale storage deployments,"
said Alan Atkinson, VP and GM of Dell storage. "JAIST’s selection of Dell Compellent is the latest example of our
ability to efficiently and cost effctively offer both performance and
protection to power business-critical workloads."

JAIST adopted Dell storage for FRONTIER to
centralize the management of large research data sets created and accessed by
individual researchers and teams. In order to deliver necessary data for the
users’ research activities, JAIST
replaced two previous systems with Compellent, providing a combination of
both performance and capacity to manage a large volume of data in one
solution.

When updating its centralized storage
system, JAIST faced a number of challenges, including achieving fast data access
and constructing efficient backup for large data sets. Another key requirement
for JAIST was to eliminate the issue of depleted IPv4 addresses and build an
efficient storage infrastructure with IPv6 compatibility. Through
Compellent’s support of IPv6, JAIST can extend its infrastructure to the
required scale provided by the new 128-bit addressing scheme.

Dell was chosen to help solve these
challenges and improve the performance of JAIST’s storage
capabilities. With Compellent’s automated data tiering technology, JAIST
can benefit from both the performance and capacity from a single system, which
previously had been managed separately.

Compellent system also
provides:

• Automated data tiering allows for automated management and movement of data
  between a combination of SSD and SAS drives, and enables fast data access and
  high-capacity with fewer disks
• Compatibility with IPv6 using Compellent zNAS to build an efficient
  storage infrastructure
• Advanced snapshot features, which provide efficient storage of only the changes
  made to stored data for fast local recovery
• Advanced replication feature that only replicates changed data provides DR for petabytes of data