Monash University, one of Australia’s most prestigious research universities, has implemented a massive multi-petabyte deployment on Red Hat Ceph Storage.
Founded in 1958, Monash University was established to create a science and technology-focused research institution. Almost 60 years later, Monash is Australia’s largest university, and now includes a curriculum that spans multiple disciplines and across five international campus. The University’s eResearch Centre fosters international collaboration and advanced research of both fundamental and applied sciences, with an emphasis on imaging and data science. Eventually, the critical need to manage a continually growing pool of research data collided with the prohibitively huge investment presented by its previously deployed proprietary hardware solutions, leaving the University at a crossroads.
Monash University selected Red Hat to implement a software-defined solution using Red Hat Ceph Storage on Dell EMC PowerEdge R630 and R730xd rack servers that can accelerate application performance, simplify systems management and address workloads at any level. Using Red Hat Ceph Storage as an object store, Monash projects that its software-defined storage solution will significantly reduce costs and give researchers the freedom to independently and incrementally add capacity and performance for future growth.
Monash University’s eResearch Centre is now able to store and manage massive workloads of data, already encompassing five petabytes, within a single infrastructure. In addition to tight integration with OpenStack components and services along with strong life cycle management, Red Hat Ceph Storage allows for replication and erasure coding capabilities for increased data protection and availability.
Steve Quenette, deputy director: Monash eResearch Center at Monash University, says: “As a research institution, we are faced with the challenge of virtually limitless data, not only from new projects, but from archived and long-tail research. One of our key concerns in this process was having enough storage space in an OpenStack cloud environment, as it supports the majority of use cases from our researchers. With Red Hat Ceph Storage, we have been able to alleviate those concerns and have confidence in our ability to support future workloads with an intuitive, cost effective solution.”
Ranga Rangachari, vice-president and GM: storage at Red Hat, comments: “Monash University’s eResearch Centre’s concern with managing ever-increasing amounts of data is a challenge that many organizations are likely to experience in the coming years. A 2016 study, commissioned by Red Hat, found that 70 percent of IT decision makers believe that their organizations’ storage are not equipped to handle next generation workloads.[1] Monash University is a prime example of meeting that challenge head-on by not only focusing on the resolution of today’s pain-points, but also having the foresight to plan for future needs. We are proud to collaborate with such a prestigious institution to enable further research.”
