Delivering high performance storage at the University of Queensland

Known for its leading research in fields ranging from genetics and genomics to environmental engineering and water management, the University of Queensland facilitates collaborative partnerships and engagements with geographically dispersed researchers across its various locations to integrate research capacity and accelerate time to discovery. To support its research, the University uses QRIScloud, a high-capacity cloud storage node of the NCRIS national research infrastructure operated by QCIF. QRIScloud is located at the Polaris Data Center in Springfield, Australia about 20 miles (30 kilometers) south of the University's St Lucia Campus. QRIScloud and the University’s data storage fabric are interconnected and designed to exchange stored data automatically. Before implementing the high-performance data storage fabric, exchanging data between QRIScloud and on-campus data centers was handled manually – a suboptimal use of busy researchers’ time. 

“The University’s researchers are making landmark discoveries in fields spanning human heritable disease, cancer, agriculture and biofuels manufacture – and they depend on our IT team to provide them with the fastest, most efficient data storage and compute systems to support their data-heavy work,” said Professor David Abramson, University of Queensland Research Computing Center director. “Our IBM, SGI (DMF) and DDN-based data fabric allows us to deliver ultra-fast multi-site data access without requiring any extra intervention from researchers and helps us to ensure our scientists can focus their time on potentially life-saving discoveries.”

 

Since 2007, DDN has worked with IBM to drive a technology vision providing data intensive environments with the best solutions to cost-effectively manage their data while actively deriving value and business benefit from the storage content. Partnering with IBM, DDN’s innovation is delivering best of class forward-thinking solutions for data analytics, chip design, bioinformatics and genomics; financial services risk calculations, computational fluid dynamics, computer aided design and seismic processing.
 

In data centers such as the University of Queensland and others across the globe, data analytics, cloud computing and open source software integration are taking center stage. Solutions from DDN and IBM provide the software-defined storage layer and high performance hardware necessary to keep pace with today’s rapidly growing data demands.

DDN offers IBM Spectrum Scale as an integrated part of its GRIDScaler high-performance NAS solutions. DDN GRIDScaler solutions include a wide range of value-add features unique to DDN that expand on core IBM Spectrum Scale functionality, including in-storage processing that can reduce application latency by more than 50 percent and tiering to DDN WOS® Object Storage.

DDN offers the deep technical knowledge to design, deploy and support the most optimized IBM Spectrum Scale solutions delivering best in class industry price/throughput, price/performance and price/capacity, while allowing users the benefit of their field architecture experience in deploying:

 

·       GRIDScaler/IBM Spectrum Scale production systems with 30+ PB in single namespace;

·       One of the largest IBM Spectrum Scale production clusters on the globe with 10,000+ nodes; and

·       Highly optimized appliances that deliver greater than 400 GB/s throughput to a single file system.

With the latest releases of GRIDScaler and IBM Spectrum Scale, DDN is now able to provide additional new features and capabilities including support for both Omni-Path and 100GigE, new archiving options that extend parallel file system storage to both local and remote object storage via DDN WOS and S3 targets, and new GUI options that simplify usability across a wide range of high performance storage systems.