Rice U. Preserves History With Isilon

Isilon Systems announced that Rice
University has selected Isilon’s IQ clustered storage system as its central
repository for digital multimedia, including video of selected speeches by
international dignitaries and musical performances from the Shepherd School of
Music.

In an effort to preserve the many historic events held at these
prestigious venues and ensure the productions are available to the public into
perpetuity, Rice has deployed Isilon clustered storage to consolidate hundreds
of recorded musical performances and keynote speeches into a single, highly
scalable and reliable shared pool of storage for the Rice Digital Scholarship
Archive, an institutional repository based on the DSpace software platform.

"For decades, the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy and the
Shepherd School have been renowned across the country for the prestigious
litany of speakers and concerts held here at Rice University every year," said
Geneva Henry, Executive Director, Digital Library Initiative, Rice University.
"Isilon’s clustered storage systems enable us to preserve and reliably deliver
these one-of-a-kind events as part of our mission to cultivate a diverse
community of learning and discovery that produces leaders across the spectrum
of human endeavor."

Through a cooperative effort between Rice University’s Digital Library
Initiative, Fondren Library and Central IT department, the university has
created a central repository for all its critical multi-media content,
enabling a variety of departments to execute on vital, content-driven projects
simultaneously, activity that was impossible with traditional storage. Prior
to using Isilon IQ, Rice’s storage management for the Digital Scholarship
archiving system was unable to effectively support management of large digital
video and audio files that required streaming for delivery. These assets,
therefore, were stored on a variety of streaming servers by various groups
across campus, creating multiple access bottlenecks that led to inefficient
storage management and undue IT cost and complexity. By unifying all of its
digital content onto one, easy to use, "pay as you grow" clustered storage
system, Rice University has removed costly data access and management barriers
and dramatically simplified its storage architecture. Additionally, using
Isilon’s SmartQuotas provisioning and quota management software
application, Rice is also storing its Language Center’s multi-media course
work and its Central IT department’s webcasts on Isilon IQ, delivering
immediate, concurrent data access to multiple users and user groups, further
reducing storage management costs to maximize system efficiency.

Rice University will stream its collection of musical performances from
the Shepherd School, as well as its video library of the many world leaders
and dignitaries that have spoken at the Baker Institute, to thousands of users
online. This operation necessitates the use of multiple media servers, using
Windows, Quicktime and Real Player formats. Isilon clustered storage
communicates natively over CIFS, NFS FTP, and HTTP, as well as interoperating
with Windows, Mac and Linux environments, enabling seamless integration with
Rice’s variety of server formats and enabling all content to be streamed from
one, central, easily and immediately accessible storage system. With Isilon
IQ, Rice’s entire collection of multi-media is accessible to all its servers
24x7x365, ensuring that the media streaming operations are not only efficient
and cost-effective, but prepared to meet high user demand.

"Digital content and unstructured data is the fastest growing category of
data on earth and is overwhelming traditional storage systems, which were not
designed to cost-effectively store and manage the large file sizes, rapid
growth and multiple formats common to this category of data," said Brett
Goodwin, VP of Marketing & Business Development, Isilon Systems. "As digital
content continues to infiltrate organizations, a new storage architecture is
necessary to not only efficiently store and manage this data, but also
interoperate with the multiple formats and native systems through which this
data is created and accessed. Rice University’s use of Isilon IQ to unify
disparate silos of data and enable multiple departments to concurrently access
critical content is exemplary of how clustered storage can significantly
reduce storage costs and streamline IT operations."

Rice University

Isilon Systems