JetStor® Storage Supports the World’s Leading Atmospheric Research

UCAR’s mission is to advance understanding of weather, climate, and water. How do the atmosphere, oceans, land surfaces, and ice interact? It relies on many scientists and a fleet of specially equipped aircraft and satellites to gather data. These data are used to make models of Earth’s systems to better grasp how the planet functions and to predict how these systems might change. UCAR seeks to educate the public, the future workforce and government decision-makers to ensure sound policy and investment decisions that meet society’s needs. UCAR’s funders include such institutions as NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), among others. The organization has nearly 1,400 employees.

The ESA team deployed a JetStor 812iXD storage solution provisioned with high-performance solid-state drives. The platform anchors a Microsoft HyperV Cluster virtualization solution that is much more efficient and cost-effective than its prior single-use physical servers. A mix of local and cloud-virtualized solutions provides the integration between the human resources, financial, and administrative apps, where the JetStor 812iXD array is the local system’s backbone.

“A JetStor storage platform has been a mainstay of a VMware cluster in another department, so we knew that a JetStor array would support our data center virtualization architecture,” said the UCAR team member. “JetStor products provide availability at a competitive price. Moreover, the solid-state drives of the JetStor 812iXD chassis have the performance to deliver demanding applications.”

With a JetStor array at the back end of its hybrid on-premise/cloud environment, UCAR eliminated the expense and overhead of managing its legacy server farm and provide applications that support the organization’s business functions.

UCAR installed a 2U, 12-bay JetStor 812iXD platform in its data center and provisioned each bay with a 1.9 terabyte solid-state drive for exceptional read/write performance. The solution supports virtualization for VMware VAAI, Microsoft Hyper-V ODX, and Citrix, and it features dual controllers. If one controller fails, the system automatically fails over to the second controller. Each controller on the JetStor array connects to a Juniper QFX5100-48T switch with redundant 10 gigabytes/second links, and the switch talks to four Dell R730 Servers via redundant 10 gigabytes/second links. The JetStor chassis is configured for RAID 6, which protects data against the unlikely failure of two disks. It stores up to two terabytes of UCAR’s data every month. “We did the installation ourselves,” said the UCAR team member. “When we had a question, we’d fire off an email to JetStor and got answers promptly. This support factored into our decision to go back to them.”

JETSTOR

JetStor meets the evolving needs for data storage, protection, and management. We leverage leading technologies to offer high-value solutions for NAS, SANs, clouds, and hyper-converged infrastructures (HCIs).  Since 1994, our customers have spanned virtually every industry, and range from Fortune 500 enterprises to small and medium-sized firms.  We support environments from data centers and clouds to branch offices and remote sites.

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