New clustered NAS storage has provided the eminent university's engineering department with increased capacity and availability, while reducing cost and management overheads.
SituationThe Engineering Department of the University of Cambridge is its largest, accounting for nearly 10 per cent of its research and teaching activity. With nearly 2,500 students, researchers and staff, capacity constraints in the department's storage system meant it was unable to provide sensible fill quotas to research users.
The department decided to migrate its existing Unix-based storage infrastructure to add capacity and increase scalability and data integrity. At the same time, it also wanted to reduce its high management overheads and lack of robustness cost effectively.
Solution
File serving for the engineering department was previously based on standard Unix servers with JBOD storage, before its IT management added a RAID array to the central fileserver. But the standard Unix Network File System (NFS) and Samba protocol-based servers had high maintenance and upgrade costs.
