Nexsan has announced the department of computer science at Brigham Young University (the US’s largest religious university and the third largest private university in the country) has integrated Nexsan’s Flexible Storage Platform to support its multi-purpose storage infrastructure. The Flexible Storage Platform was chosen to support the department’s virtualized operating environment with high capacity storage for both structured and unstructured data because of its high performance, reliability, efficiency and value.
Nexsan has announced the department of computer science at Brigham Young University (the US’s largest religious university and the third largest private university in the country) has integrated Nexsan’s Flexible Storage Platform to support its multi-purpose storage infrastructure. The Flexible Storage Platform was chosen to support the department’s virtualized operating environment with high capacity storage for both structured and unstructured data because of its high performance, reliability, efficiency and value.
Researchers at Brigham Young University’s computer science department create enormous amounts of data creating in the need for a reliable back-end storage solution for their VMware vSphere 4 enabled virtual operating environment. As many as 40 virtual machines can be configured at the same time in support of research storage needs, including structured Oracle and MySQL database data and unstructured file and image information. As a result, the department required a flexible and reliable disk array that would support their active virtual environment in an efficient manner.
Loren Harshbarger, Systems & Network Architect/Manager, in the computer science department of Brigham Young University, turned to IO Dynamics (a Nexsan value added reseller) to deploy a flexible storage solution to address the department’s unique dynamic infrastructure. Nexsan was selected as the vendor because of its experience in supporting all types of data in a flexible, yet cost efficient way. Additionally, its high reliability storage and advanced features, such as power consumption reduction, and a low total cost of ownership, were ideal for this virtual operating environment.
The computer science department deployed Nexsan storage fully populated with 1TB SATA drives. The SATA RAID storage system is connected to an HP BladeSystem C3000 enclosure with a dynamic mix of approximately 40 virtual machines.
Nexsan storage system will give students and faculty at the University continuous access to data in support of computer science department projects, such as the Facebook application ‘Relative Finder’, which was created by several Professor Tom Sederberg and computer science major students. The application runs on a virtual web and virtual MySQL server that reside on Nexsan storage. Relative Finder allows users to search up to ten generations in the past to find relatives and can even show their relationships with famous historical figures.
