Imperial College London ditches Microsoft to put 200TB of data in IBM storage

Incumbent system was 'a bit of a beast' says ICT services manager

Imperial College London has chosen IBM to replace a Microsoft-based storage system, putting daily video and audio records of all of its lectures in a scalable Linux environment.

Designed and implemented by OCF, the high-performance computing specialist, the environment - which totals half-a-petabyte of space - replaces a system that Imperial College described as "increasingly difficult to grow and administer".

"We wanted a system that could grow and scale more easily and protect large data sets more effectively and efficiently," said Steven Lawlor, ICT data centre services manager at Imperial College London.

"Our old system no longer scaled and was becoming a bit of a beast. The new system will be easier to expand and more cost-effective, in part because we can now move data to tape for long-term storage, a key requirement for certain types of research data."

He continued: "Uptime is one of the most important factors - we wanted a system that could also be maintained and expanded whilst still running."

OCF's solution comprises eight IBM x3650 M4 GPFS (General Parallel File System) storage clusters and network attached storage (NAS) servers, with four IBM Storwize v3700 storage arrays.

One standout feature of the installation is that users can recover their own lost or deleted data for up to 14 days after loss or corruption, something Lawlor said has reduced the burden on IT staff "significantly".

Imperial College has already migrated all of its existing video content from the Microsoft set-up to IBM's GPFS, and is currently moving the rest. The finished file transfer will amount to 200TB of data available for viewing and editing by 20,000 users. The system will continue storing data from around 100 lectures per day.