ONStor announced that the Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science at the University of Miami has chosen the ONStor Bobcat NAS gateway for its two data centers. The school chose ONStor’s open, clustered NAS solution, because it provides the reliable, interoperable, and scalable architecture that its data centers require to process the hundreds of terabytes of scientific data collected by the university annually.

"ONStor’s virtual file servers act as regular Windows file servers on our network, but without many of the software update issues of regular Windows computers," said Michael Anderson, director of computing at the Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science. "By loading a standardized software image on the ONStor unit, we don’t have to deal with the downtime and time consumption that updating multiple Windows machines require."

The Challenge of a Non-Standardized IT Environment
One operational challenge for the School results from the distributed nature of how research is conducted. Individual projects are relatively autonomous, and sharing common IT infrastructure elements is often unrealistic. Each project tends to favor a different technology or solution, and storage purchasing decisions are frequently based on the ability to share information across parallel technology with colleagues at other institutions. Collaboration with other interested parties often means that the technology used in the School’s IT environment is not standardized, limiting what disk subsystems can be purchased and how they’re deployed and managed.

"With ONStor, a single methodology for providing network-attached storage is possible, even with our many different varieties of disk systems," says Anderson. "We want our scientists to view disk storage as something that 'just exists' out on the network—like a dial tone when you pick up a telephone. ONStor interoperates with several of our incumbent mass-storage solutions and offers us the flexibility to integrate other data management solutions as required."

The School’s prior storage solution, which had initially addressed this issue, became too costly to manage and could not keep pace with a data growth of 50 terabytes a year. Much of the Rosenstiel School’s largest data files consist of satellite images from above and below the ocean’s surface. The researchers then study these images and accumulate their findings onto the storage. ONStor’s cost-effective NAS gateway solution is able to continually assimilate all of the disparate storage that the School deploys, presenting it under a consolidated interface for simple administration. Since the ONStor system can scale up to 3.2 petabytes, there is plenty of room to keep growing.

Protecting Data Against the Wrath of Mother Nature
"Our primary campus is located on Virginia Key, an island just off the shore from downtown Miami. Since we are occasionally in the path of the oncoming hurricanes we study, offsite replication of critical data is an important consideration," says Anderson. "ONStor provides a solution that allows us to easily replicate information between data centers, creating full redundancy, so another copy of our files exists outside of the path of any natural disaster."

As the only subtropical institute of its kind in the continental United States, the Rosenstiel School’s academic community is comprised of more than 100 Ph.D. faculty members, 190 graduate students, and more than 250 research support staff. Through excellence in applied and basic marine and atmospheric research, the Rosenstiel School sheds light on today's most pressing environmental issues, including climate change, sustainable fisheries, coral reefs, oceans and human health, coastal observation, sea level rise and hurricanes.