The engineering department of the University of Cambridge has selected ONStor’s NAS gateways to provide its staff and students with a resilient home directory storage facility.
The department has 400 employees, and about 1100 undergraduate and 600 postgraduate students and post-doctoral researchers. It has deployed two ONStor Bobcat 2440s, each with 12 terabyte Infrotrend storage. They are located at separate sites with file systems mirrored between sites.
The main server provides home directory services as well as applications serving and administrative file access to the whole department. Both NFS and CIFS protocols are used. The remote site server at West Cambridge provides local home directory and group file space for users at that site, and brings a mirror target for the main site.
ONStor Bobcat series clustered NAS gateways deliver file services with data availability and scalability across a range of enterprise SAN storage systems. Designed to address the file services for mid-range performance needs of enterprises, Bobcat NAS gateways enable customers to start small and gradually expand business over time.
At the university, ONStor has replaced JBOD storage Unix servers, which had constrained the department from providing sensible file quotas to research users. ONStor has said that the department has selected its storage system over those of EMC, BlueArc, NetApp, and Isllon.
Stephen Mounsey, systems manager at the University of Cambridge, said: “The ONStor Bobcat solution provides impressive capacity with an increase in reliability and improved throughput and data recovery (through a snapshot mechanism) compared with our previous system. If there’s one feature of the ONStor solution that sets it apart from the other products we reviewed, it is the affordable and flexible scalability.”
Content from our partners
