Delivering High Performance, Scalable Storage Infrastructure
The Challenge
Formed in 1962, the British Antarctic Survey is world renowned for delivering and enabling interdisciplinary research in the Polar Regions. Its skilled science and support staff, based in Cambridge, Antarctica and the Arctic, work together to deliver research that uses the Polar Regions to advance our understanding of Earth as a sustainable planet.
The Problem
The BAS storage and backup systems have operated successfully for well over a decade, but this legacy technology was nearing end of life and close to capacity. As Jeremy Robst, Head of Linux Systems at the BAS, explained, “Our existing solution had performed well, but the administrative and management overhead was becoming very significant. In addition to improving performance, we also needed to increase storage and backup capacity alongside our ability to scale as our requirements increased in the future.”
Solution
A publicly-funded organisation, the BAS fulfils its procurement requirements via competitive tender.
Benefits
“We have seen very significant improvement across every key metric, from performance to latency and bandwidth,” said Robst. “Our storage and backup infrastructure is more available, delivers much greater redundancy and has no single point of failure, which is particularly important for a data-driven organisation such as the BAS.” He continued, “In the future, we will certainly need to add more storage capacity. This is due to a number of factors, such as the impact of the work being done on the RRS Sir David Attenborough.” To meet these needs, the density provided by the Qumulo solution enables the BAS to add further nodes within their server environment, maximising efficiency.
