US Government Research Agency Chooses AC&NC

Advanced Computer & Network Corp. (AC&NC) JetStor announced that a government agency based in Colorado and founded over 60 years ago, has chosen JetStor storage.

The agency is leading research into the environment and work closely with universities and scientists WW to better understand the environment and how its components interact with each other.

It relies on numerous scientists and a fleet of specially equipped aircraft and satellites to measure Earth’s systems and gather environmental data. With the data, the agency’s researchers make models of these systems to learn how the planet functions and to predict how the systems might change.

The agency also seeks to educate the public, the workforce, and government decision-makers to ensure sound policy and investment decisions are made that meet society’s needs. The organization has over a thousand employees.

Challenge
The agency is responsible for the financial, human resources, facilities, and IT functions that are essential to its success, no small feat considering its roster of employees and participating scientists scattered across 7 continents. Its many applications must always be available and storage performance has become critical because of the increasing size and sophistication of its applications.

Compounding the challenge was the migration of some business functions to a hybrid environment using local data centers and SaaS for greater efficiencies, enabling the team to retire a myriad of physical servers including an iSCSI storage server. This strategy would reduce management needs and energy costs, as well as eliminate the expense of periodically replacing the servers at the end of their service cycles.

As a result, the agency required a reliable storage platform to fulfill its demands for the foreseeable future.

“Our agency has used JetStor products from AC&NC for many years,” said an agency systems administrator. “We have over 50 JetStor storage arrays in our organization, such as JetStor 816F units distributed across several departments. For that reason, we again turned to AC&NC.“

Solution: One JetStor 812iXD iSCSI platform from AC&NC

System configuration:

• One JetStor 812iXD iSCSI platform with 12×1.9TB SSDs
• Four Dell R730 Servers
• Juniper QFX5100-48T switches

Benefits Realized
The agency deployed a JetStor 812iXD storage solution provisioned with SSDs. The platform anchors a Microsoft HyperV Cluster virtualization solution that is much more efficient than its prior single-use physical servers. A mix of local and cloud virtualized solutions provides the integration between the human resources, financial, and administrative apps, where the JetStor 812iXD array is the local system’s storage backbone.

“A JetStor storage platform has been a mainstay of a VMware cluster in another department, so we knew that a JetStor array would support our data center virtualization architecture,” said the systems administrator. “JetStor products provide availability at a competitive price. Moreover, the SSDs of the JetStor 812iXD chassis have the performance to deliver demanding applications.”

With a JetStor array at the back end of its hybrid on-premise/cloud environment, the agency eliminated the expense and overhead of managing its legacy server farm.

How we did It
The agency installed a 2U, 12-bay JetStor 812iXD platform in its data center and provisioned each bay with a 1.9TB SSD for R/W performance. The solution supports virtualization for VMware VAAI, Hyper-V ODX, and Citrix, and it features dual controllers. If one controller fails, the system automatically fails over to the second controller.

Each controller on the JetStor array connects to a Juniper QFX5100-48T switch with redundant 10GB/s links, and the switch talks to 4 Dell R730 Servers via redundant 10GB/s links.

The JetStor chassis is configured for RAID-6, which protects data vs. the unlikely failure of 2 disks. The device stores up to 2TB of data every month.

“We did the installation ourselves,” said the systems administrator. “When we had a question, we’d fire off an email to AC&NC and got answers promptly. This support factored into our decision to go back to AC&NC.“

Conclusion
“Whether for enterprise data centers like ours or remote offices, JetStor solutions are a good choice,” concluded the systems administrator. “They help to fulfill our mission. Our ability to store and access data of all sorts enables our organization to function smoothly. We have so much more to learn about Earth’s systems, but provisioned with technologies like JetStor storage systems, we’ll gain knowledge quickly and efficiently.“