Oxford Martin School Upgrades Storage Infrastructure With Quantum QXS Arrays

Oxford University is not only the oldest university in the English-speaking world, but also one of the most influential—to date, more than 50 Nobel Laureates and 50 world leaders have been directly associated with it. The most recent addition to Oxford’s independently governed colleges is the Oxford Martin School, founded in 2005. The Oxford Martin School provides a unique environment to fund projects that combine disciplines to address the most significant problems facing the world’s future. Today, approximately 250 researchers are engaged in more than 20 active programs, ranging from innovations in food sciences and healthcare to methods for geo-engineering and ways to advance human rights.

创新研究需要灵活

协作研究团队需要一种动态和灵活的方法。“Above all, we need to remain flexible and adaptive to the sometimes rapidly changing needs of the research teams,” explains Andrew Foulsham, IT manager at Oxford Martin School, “and we need to be certain that we keep the teams’ data safe and continuously available.” Initially the school used direct-attached arrays, but found management was time-consuming, and data availability was an issue.

Moving to Shared Storage, Virtualization, and Quantum QXS Arrays

该团队决定移动到统一存储和虚拟化服务器环境。“我们知道在SAN上的集中存储可以增加研究团队的访问速度，当我们需要更多的容量时，将更容易扩展，并且还可以使我们管理可用存储池更容易，”Foulsham解释说。“虚拟化将使我们创建新的应用程序和股票更容易并且更快，因为我们的研究团队推出了新项目，更改了正在进行的次数，或移到不同的位置。对于致力于使未来更好的机构也非常重要，它将消耗大量的电力和冷却资源。“

为了帮助找到最佳方法，该团队带来了经验丰富的存储集成商，公园广场技术。该团队为虚拟化和量子的QXS-4系列混合存储阵列选择了VMware，用于共享存储。QXS阵列提供了可轻松可扩展的RAID，支持以竞争力的价格提供全方位的性能和容量。

更快的性能，降低成本

新安装大致为十几个服务器虚拟化，并连接到24 TB的QXS RAID。除了使其更容易设置共享并提高数据可用性，系统将更快。“在我们的第一天，我们的一个Web开发人员使用该系统，他注意到它具有他所谓的”疯狂更快的性能“，我们也看到了其他应用程序的大量收益，”Foulsham补充道。“新系统还为学校提供了大量的储蓄。我们将在未来几年内将我们将省数万英镑用于牛津马丁。“

Exemplary Reliability and Path to SSDs in the Future

新系统也大大提高了可靠性。“在我们推出了系统的九个月内，我们还没有停机时间，公园场所技术的服务一直是示范性的，”Foulsham说。“早期，我们在阵列中有一个控制器失败，但从未错过任何节拍。该系统是用冗余构建的，因此它在整个事件中保持工作，第二天早上安装了替换模块，没有任何中断服务。“

qx、混合存储阵列也考虑到team the option of easily adding SSDs to its storage mix. The Oxford Martin team wanted the performance of flash, but using SSDs for all the storage was too expensive. Quantum’s hybrid arrays offer the alternative of adding a layer of SSDs to the spinning disk and using Quantum Q-Tier™ to move the most active files to the flash tier. “We believe that the QXS arrays will give us the performance advantages of solid-state drives while keeping costs low. We already have the migration software [Q-Tier] in place.”