Leading universities manage administrative and research data with Red Hat Open Software-defined Storage

Red Hat Storage helps re-engineer the storage functionality for higher education IT environments – including University of Reading and McMaster University – to manage the growing challenges of big data. A truly open, software-only storage solution based on community-driven innovation, Red Hat Storage helps universities manage petabyte-scale workloads to help produce important research and enable more effective online courses.
University of Reading, Reading, United Kingdom (U.K.)

Established in 1892, the University of Reading is a leading force in British and international higher education and is ranked in the top one percent of universities in the world. It is the only U.K. university to offer a full range of undergraduate and postgraduate courses in meteorology. The university’s Department of Meteorology needed a highly reliable, available, and scalable storage file system to manage data for its scientific research projects in weather, climate, and earth observation.

With Red Hat Storage Server, the department saves IT staff valuable time previously spent on maintenance and administration. Two new high-capacity servers have been deployed with Red Hat Storage to enable the system to scale to support 300 terabytes of data. Additionally, the department is gradually adding data from older, stand-alone servers to host more than 1 petabyte of data in total.

McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Founded in 1887 by Senator William McMaster, McMaster University ranks sixth in the country in university research intensity and is known for developing the learning approach, the “McMaster Model”, that is now adopted by universities worldwide. McMaster University was in the middle of a major ERP software deployment when it needed a new storage system with high availability and data replication capabilities. Having already invested heavily in storage hardware, the university searched for a cost-effective and reliable software-defined storage solution and found it in Red Hat Storage Server. The results have given McMaster University the flexibility it needs to take care of both existing and future storage requirements.

The university’s Red Hat Storage Server deployment can be expanded or upgraded in real-time without disrupting operations. One of the primary reasons the university implemented Red Hat Storage Server is that it could continue to add more highly available storage to their environment without compromising on performance and without impacting downtime.