Reliable and Scalable Storage Progressive Infotech designs and implements a highly available, and easily scalable centralized storage setup for one of India’s top technological institutes
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leading technological institute based in North India wanted to develop a centralized storage solution for its campus. The Institute imparts training to students to help them become competent engineers and scientists. It offers Bachelor, Master and Doctoral programs in various branches of technology and science.
Looking for 30TB and More
In Brief Challenge India’s top technological institute wanted to have a centralized storage solution that would cater to 30 TB of data and be highly available as well as scalable. The Institute also had many other technical specifications defined for this.
The Institute wanted to have an NFS (network file system) storage solution that would handle all the data storage requirements of the students and the faculty. This had to be a centralized solution. The Institute also had very specific guidelines on the solution. They were: scalability to 60TB of storage with dual ported hot pluggable 2GBPs 300GB FC drives with proper RAID and fault tolerant performance support for multiple file servers virtualization at the disk level integrated back-end infrastructure based on LTO drives clustered configuration with active-active component redundancy should be able to deliver SpecFS points laid out by the Institute n
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Solution Progressive designed a six-node EFS cluster running Linux for this, which is capable of delivering a lot more than what the Institute had specified as benchmarks. This would connect to the back-end storage array through two 16-port SAN switches. A backup solution using LTO3 drives was also recommended. All hardware was from HP. Benefits The Institute now runs a highly available and scalable storage solution with no single point of failure. It is easy to add or remove nodes to the cluster in the architecture developed by Progressive. The solution is very easy to manage. All this has resulted in a low TCO for the Institute.
Delivering Far More
Progressive came up with a solution, which had a six-node EFS cluster that delivered far beyond the SpecFS points specified by the Institute. It was purely for this reason that the Institute chose to go with Progressive’s solution. The Institute was careful about selecting the right solution, as their data consists of loads of high-end research work and the Institute’s IPR. Loss of data could mean that years of research work is lost. For the file server, Progressive recommended the sixnode based EFS Cluster Gateway solution running Linux. These HP servers also had redundant interfaces to the backend storage array. For the back-end storage array, EVA8000 with redundant active-active controllers and FC drives were recommended. This allowed for virtualization to optimize storage for the best performance for the said configuration and application. It also had its own management software called Command View EVA. copyright © 2007