University of Connecticut Health Center Reaches Himalaya

Amplidata NV announced that University of Connecticut Health Center (UConn Health) has purchased and installed a storage system based on Amplidata’s Himalaya object-based, SDS software.

UConn Health has used NAS storage for its expanding storage needs, moving from its first HPC cluster in 1998 to a server room and then to a dedicated HPC data center by 2010, but found its needs continuing to grow beyond what was feasible at the cost of expanding NAS implementations. It has turned to a scalable, and cost effective Himalaya-based object storage systems that not only meets UConn Health’s growing needs, but those of the University of Connecticut at large.

“Our big data-ready solution provides a flexible path for organizations heavily invested in legacy NAS that extends that investment while accommodating their geometric data growth,” said Michael Wall, Amplidata CEO. “The Himalaya-based next generation NAS solution is perfect for organizations like UConn Health that need to maintain their applications designed for NAS, but need a cost effective way to quickly scale on line storage.“

“We had the typical big data problem – the exponential growth of data – and we were looking for a reliable, scalable and cost effective solution for the long term,” said associate professor of cell biology and director of the HPC facility, UConn Health, Ion Moraru, “We were an all-NAS storage facility and that was not a sustainable model. We implemented Amplidata’s solution on a small scale and we decided to expand it well beyond the original scope. It’s now a global solution for storage beyond UConn Health to be a resource UConn-wide. It’s an answer to the big data challenge at UConn.“

UConn Health plans to keep its legacy storage system at 90% capacity and continue to move any additional data to the Himalaya system. The Himalaya implementation started with five storage nodes, and has scaled to accommodate increasing data needs, At more than six-fold the original total system capacity. Moraru expects storage needs to continue doubling every year.

Criteria that led to UConn Health’s decision to choose Amplidata’s solution included the company use of erasure codes to provide a high level of data durability with low hardware overhead, its automated geographic distribution of data, the ability to add storage in increments as small as one storage node at a time, the cost effectiveness of the solution and access to technical information and staff.

“It’s a hybrid cloud/NAS solution that’s very powerful in terms of cost effectiveness, scaling and collaboration,” added Moraru.