Educational institution IT departments are faced with a broad range of storage related issues associated with the various use cases they need to support on a daily basis. The amount of data created by administrators, students, faculty, and by researchers is growing at a tremendous rate driven by the rapid migration to an all-digital workflow, e-learning and advancements in research tools such as gene sequencers and mass spectrometers. A large subset of this data also needs to be accessible for remote students and faculty, distributed collaboration at satellite campuses or partner research facilities. Caringo object storage software solves these issues and enables Educational IT departments with limited resources and existing heterogeneous storage servers to quickly implement a massively scalable and accessible storage solution that is easy to manage.
Massively Scalable, Globally Accessible, Easy to Manage
The Caringo object storage software suite powered by CAStor enables you to use any combination of x86 server hardware and any size of hard drive to create a massively scalable storage solution that is accessible via HTTP. Storage and networking resources are pooled and work together to provide responsive storage with consistent performance regardless of object size (even small files) or object count. Integrated secure multi-tenant functionality ensures that every department, project, faculty member or student has their own scalable storage location all under a single namespace making it easy to manage and expand.
- Easy to implement — CAStor software can boot from a USB key or can PXE boot from the network. Add another node and it automatically configures itself, joins the network and participates with the other CAStor nodes in the cluster.
- Runs on industry standard hardware — Storage clusters can be built on any X86 server with at least 1 GB of RAM, 1 hard drive, and Gigabit Ethernet. Use any combination of vendors and generations. As new technology becomes available, just plug the server in and CAStor will instantly provision it!
- Massively scale capacity – meet any demand — Scale by simply inserting one, or more nodes into the cluster. Additional capacity is automatically available; no provisioning by an administrator. Minimize administrative overhead to increase storage up to Petabytes of capacity in a single cluster.
- Secure multi-tenant architecture — Subdivide Caringo CAStor into separate domains for multiple departments, division or end users while maintaining full control over data access and data security.
- Open RESTful HTTP interface — Applications and devices interface to CAStor using industry standard HTTP 1.1. This enables quick development and the ability to utilize existing HTTP client libraries in use throughout the industry.
The University of Utrecht is efficiently archiving raw research data using object storage.
The University of Utrecht in the Netherlands fosters innovative research that contributes to economic development and the solution of social issues such as climate change, infectious diseases, aging and public health. The Biomolecular Mass Spectrometry and Proteomics group is efficiently managing and storing very large amounts of raw data generated daily to the Dell DX Object Storage Platform powered by Caringo.
The Challenge
- Big storage needs on a limited research budget
- Long term deep archive requirements
- Share and replicate data across existing CIFS network
The Solution
- Leverage CAStor SDK for custom application integration
- Use the power of metadata as a basis for future projects
- Run on any standard commodity hardware for attractive ROI
- Integrate with Active Directory for industry standard authentication
- Built-in disaster recovery solution with no added cost
The Results
- Metadata intelligence applied to enforcing data protection policies for a lifetime
- Powerful new applications designed to harness custom metadata
- Decreased cost of storage infrastructure by migrating to the Dell DX Object Storage Platform
- Reduced management and administrative costs with self-managing, self-healing clusters
- Surpass throughput SLAs with twice the speed for file access utilizing Caringo's CIFS integration
- Expansion ready to seamlessly upgrade nodes and cluster capacity with no impact on production
The Configuration
- Object storage cluster is configured as two (2) subclusters with half of the storage servers located in the lab and half in a remote data center for automatic disaster recovery without any added cost.
- Lab spectrometers and research workstations seamlessly access storage over the existing CIFS network.
