Birkbeck College Realized High-Performing Unified IP SAN/NAS Storage Solution

The performance demands placed on IT storage at Birkbeck College's School of Crystallogra-phy are relatively extreme. Modelling molecular dynamics and processing data from electronmicroscopes are far from the norms of data processing in most oranizations. But the College's need to achieve high-end computing performance, data security and high availability on a very limited IT budget, is a challenge which rings true with any IT manager.

For the School's IT manager, Richard Westlake, this challenge has presented itself most recently in the need for networked stroage. With a large number of machines to cater for, from a 67 node IBM Blade Centre, through to Individual servers prdominantly running Linux and older Xnix distributer, the use of direct attached storage in each indivisdual machine was becoming unworkable. "Some of our applications require several TB of storage. Cable lenghts and a lack of ports were making it physically impossible to attach enough storage arrays to a machine," explains Westlake. "But more than this, without a centralized storage pool, when a server went down, all the attached storage was unavailable." With applications requiring a mixture of both block and file storage, it was also clear that the College needed a Storage Area network (SAN) with additional Network Attached Storage (NAS) functionality, rather than a lower cost NAS option.