The Queensland Brain Institute (QBI) has deployed a modular storage system in response to the daily increase in data growth of five terabytes (TB).
The institute - one of the largest neuroscience institutions in the world - was unable to keep up with the high volume of data, with IT manager, Jake Carroll, saying that the upgrade to the system was crucial for the future of the organisation.
“The old storage system wasn’t up to task, it didn’t have enough front-end host ports, didn’t have enough cache, CPU capability or density,” he said.
“Density is a big deal in this environment – it’s key and the solution we had at the time, we outgrew very quickly.”
Carroll went to market for the project and chose Hitachi Data Systems’ Adaptable Modular Storage 2500 system.
“We did go out and look at other vendors and we went to Hitachi at the end because they are the only company who could offer us dense trays in a modular form factor,” he said.
“They could offer us 48 two terabyte drives in dense trays - we could achieve extremely high density in a smaller footprint.”
The rollout was completed over a weekend mid-last year, with Carroll saying the benefits of the upgrade became apparent shortly thereafter.
“The most obvious benefits are less jobs logs in our help desk due to a less cluttered system,” he said. “We don’t have as many problems with end users and as a result, we get more done.”
QBI now has front-line disk storage to cater for the MRI imaging and high-end microscopic work of the institute, as well as a raw storage capacity of 214 TB.
Coming up next on Carroll’s IT agenda is an increase in data capacity.
“[We will embark on an] expansion of density into one of our new AMS 2300 and we will be putting more density into that,” he said. “… We’ll probably be implementing another data silo and a bigger one.”
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