Challenges – High Performance Applications & a Disruption-Free Storage Experience

One of our recent customers, a renowned pharmaceutical company in IOWA, needed to build a data center to run high end research applications, programs 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 research 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.

To summarize, the company’s requirements were:

• High performance structured data (block-level) storage solution
• Disruption-free Data Storage Experience
• Easier Management of Data Center Infrastructure
• Cost Effective Storage Solution

StoneFly’s Solution: Voyager FC SAN Appliance

Our storage experts had a couple of sit down sessions with the IT team of the pharmaceutical company. The solution they suggested was: StoneFly Voyager FC SAN appliance with Dual 2U Fiber Channel storage controllers (i9109i-D) with 24-bay high IOPS RAID expansion array.

The End Results – High Speed & Robust Research-Friendly Data Center

 StoneFly Voyager FC appliances delivered the speed the company needed and the disaggregated infrastructure ensures 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. This makes 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 are capable of supporting a maximum of 4440 storage drives with expansion units. This makes the solution a future-proof architecture.

“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.

In summary, our modular SAN appliance delivered the following additional value to the pharmaceutical company:

High Performance Data Center

With dual Xeon processors running the programs and the dedicated NVMe for the operating system, the research environment acquired the capabilities to run demanding applications and programs without a worry.

Moreover, the Voyager FC also enabled the company to prepare for the future.

Future Proof SAN Storage Solution

“What I’m really fond of is the ability to individually add performance and storage capacities when we need them to. That’s unique to our data center. And we really love it” – said Brad, the DevOps Engineer of the pharmaceutical company.

The disaggregated infrastructure makes scalability simpler. When they need to, the company can add more performance by adding only the storage controller chassis.

Similarly, when they need to add more storage, they can choose to add storage expansion units. StoneFly Voyager FC support expansion units ranging from 12 to 108 bay with support for 7200RPM, 10k, and 15k enterprise SAS, 12Gbs SSDs, and combinations of both.

This enabled the IT environment of our client to funnel their budget elsewhere instead of fat provisioning the data center in anticipation of future growth.

Easier & Dynamic Maintenance

The storage hardware, being redundant and hot-swappable, delivered the ability to dynamically add, remove or replace key hardware components such as power supplies and storage drives.

Instead of disrupting the research environment for repair and maintenance, our infrastructure gave them the option to do it in the least time possible without having to worry about longer downtime due to maintenance.

Easier Management with StoneFusion™ Operating System

While the Voyager FC supports the deployment of petabyte-scale SAN storage, the management remains simple and user-friendly with our patented storage virtualization solution: StoneFusion™.

StoneFusion delivers a single centralized web GUI that facilitates management, monitoring, and control of all appliance nodes and infrastructure within the data center. And with several enterprise-grade data services, StoneFusion also enables the customer’s IT environment to optimize data storage with ease.

Examples of said data services include thin provisioning, deduplication, erasure coding, replication, snapshots, etc.