Challenges:
- High Performance Block Storage Server
- Disruption-Free Data Storage Experience
- Easier Management
Solution:
- Voyager FC 2U Dual Storage Controllers with 24-bay RAID Expansion Array
Results:
- High Performance Data Center
- Disruption-Free Redundant Hardware
- Easier to Scale, Manage & Control
Organization
Research Lab of a Pharmaceutical Company in Massachusetts
Industry
Pharmaceutical Research
Challenges
A well known pharmaceutical company in Massachusetts, needed to build a data center to run high-end research applications and process structured data. Besides performance, the company was adamant on a disruption free experience for their research environments.
“We needed a solution that fit naturally in a demanding research environment. Our environment has zero tolerance for downtime and disruption. So we had a pretty challenging set of requirements for our data center.” noted John, the System Administrator for the pharmaceutical company.
Solution
Our storage experts at Stonefly had a few meeting sessions with the IT team of the pharmaceutical company. The solution they suggested was StoneFly’s Voyager FC SAN appliance with Dual 2U Fiber Channel storage controllers (i9109i-D) with 24-bay high IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second) RAID expansion array. The cost-effective storage solution comes pre-configured with Stonefly’s StoneFusion OS that offers an effective way to manage the data center’s infrastructure by providing a unified graphical user interface. The RAID expansion array houses storage drives for block-level storage and integrated dual active/active RAID controller for redundancy, availability and fault tolerance.
Results
StoneFly’s Voyager FC appliances delivered the speed the company needed and the disaggregated infrastructure ensured that they always have access to their data with multi-path access. To deliver a lag-free experience, the Voyager FC appliances run the operating system on a dedicated NVMe, which make data management quicker than other solutions in the market. The dual storage controllers prevent bottlenecks and support high IOPS for the research environment. Furthermore, the Voyager FC 2U storage controllers have a future-proof architecture that is capable of supporting a maximum of 4440 storage drives with expansion units.
“The response times are amazing. We have high-end applications but the data center runs them effortlessly.” said a research team member of the pharmaceutical company.
High Performance Data Center
With dual Xeon processors running the programs and a dedicated NVMe for the OS, the research environment acquired the capabilities to run demanding applications and programs without any issues.
Disruption free Scalability SAN Storage Solution
Stonefly’s Voyager FC’s disaggregated infrastructure simplifies scalability. Stonefly’s Voyager FC modular and flexible capabilities allows the company to increase performance by adding an additional storage controller chassis. Similarly, Stonefly’s Voyager FC comes with the option to add additional storage expansion units (EBODs) as well. Additional support expansion units range from 12 to 108 bays that support 7200RPM, 10k, and 15k enterprise-level SAS HDDs, 12GB SSDs, and combinations of both. These capabilities provided a cost-efficient solution and enabled the company’s IT management team to focus their budget elsewhere instead of thick provisioning the data center in anticipation of future growth.
“What I’m really fond of is the ability to individually add performance and storage capacities when we need them. That’s unique to our data center and we really love it.” said Brad, the DevOps Engineer of the pharmaceutical company.
Easy & Dynamic Maintenance
Stonefly’s Voyager FC appliances have redundant and hot swappable capabilities by allowing users to add, remove or replace key hardware components such as power supplies and storage drives without interrupting the research environment.
Streamlined Management with StoneFusion™ Operating System
While the Voyager FC supports the deployment of petabyte-scale SAN storage, management remains simple and user-friendly with our patented storage virtualization solution.
StoneFusion delivers a single centralized web GUI that facilitates management, monitoring, and control of all appliance nodes and infrastructure within the data center. With several enterprise-level data services, StoneFusion also enables the client’s IT management team to optimize data storage with ease.
Examples of data services include thin provisioning, deduplication, erasure coding, replication, snapshots, etc.
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