Universities Manage Administrative and Research Data With Red Hat Storage

Red Hat, Inc. is helping re-engineer the storage functionality for higher education IT environments – including McMaster University and University of Reading – to manage the growing challenges of big data.

McMaster University

University of Reading

An open, software-only storage solution based on community-driven innovation, Red Hat Storage helps universities manage petabyte-scale workloads to help produce important research and enable more effective online courses.

McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Founded in 1887 by Senator William McMaster, McMaster University ranks sixth in the country in university research intensity and is known for developing the learning approach, the ‘McMaster Model’, which is now adopted by universities worldwide. McMaster University was in the middle of a major ERP software deployment when it needed a new storage system with HA and data replication capabilities. Having already invested heavily in storage hardware, the university searched for a cost-effective and reliable software-defined storage solution and found it in Red Hat Storage Server. The results have given the university the flexibility it needs to take care of both existing and future storage requirements.

The university’s Red Hat Storage Server deployment can be expanded or upgraded in real-time without disrupting operations. One of the primary reasons the university implemented it is that it could continue to add more highly available storage to their environment without compromising on performance and without impacting downtime.

University of Reading, Reading, UK
Established in 1892, the University of Reading is a force in British and international higher education and is ranked in the top one percent of universities in the world. It is the only UK university to offer a range of undergraduate and postgraduate courses in meteorology. The university’s Department of Meteorology needed a reliable, available, and scalable storage file system to manage data for its scientific research projects in weather, climate, and earth observation.

With Red Hat Storage Server, the department saves IT staff valuable time previously spent on maintenance and administration. Two new high-capacity servers have been deployed with Red Hat Storage to enable the system to scale to support 300TB of data. Additionally, the department is gradually adding data from older, stand-alone servers to host more than 1 PB of data in total.

Wayde Nie, lead architect, University Technology Services, McMaster University, said: “I showed Red Hat Storage Server to our operations people, who are ultimately the ones who will have to support it, and they were amazed at how intuitive and easy it was to use. We have a heavily virtualized environment; and we wanted software-defined storage, network, and compute to work within that environment. If you export the raw storage that resides in the Red Hat Storage software-defined layer, then you get the flexibility to export it and replicate it however you require. That was absolutely key for us.“

Dan Bretherton, HPC manager, department of meteorology, University of Reading, said: “My priorities are to ensure not only that the department can store hundreds of TBs of research data efficiently and securely, but that good performance is maintained as the I/O load from our growing compute cluster increases. When I started talking to Red Hat, I received the assurances I needed that the challenges I’d experienced with managing scale-out storage could be solved. I also knew I’d get the extra help I needed from Red Hat to fine-tune the product for our academic, data-intensive HPC environment.“