RALEIGH, NC, Feb. 22 -- Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that the Cornell University Institute for Biotechnology and Life Science Technologies is using Red Hat Storage, formally Gluster, technology to manage data-intensive research projects. With Red Hat Storage Software Appliance, the department is experiencing cost-effective, highly available and scalable storage, and using it for such projects as DNA sequencing. It has delivered flexibility and reliability that has allowed the Institute to achieve the growth needed to continue its research programs, while increasing researcher productivity due to the high availability of the data.

“The Institute for Biotechnology and Life Science Technologies brings together a diverse group of university scientists conducting research in biology and the physical, engineering, and computational sciences, which produces extremely large amounts of data,” said Steven Lee, Cornell Center for Advanced Computing systems consultant.

Producing over 15 to 20 terabytes of storage a month, the Institute required a solution to provide elastic scaling capabilities while being highly available and capable of handling large amounts of data output at any given time. Prior to Red Hat Storage, the Institute's standard file systems capped at 8 and 16 terabytes per node which required significant work-arounds; it needed a storage solution that would facilitate access to all data in every node. Therefore, a global namespace was a necessity. Additionally, as a software-only solution, Red Hat Storage quickly added value to Cornell's existing infrastructure.

“The idea of a scale-out storage solution was something we’d always been interested in, but never could implement due to cost,” said James VanEe, IT director of Cornell’s Institute for Biotechnology and Life Science Technologies. “With Red Hat Storage we are able to avoid significant costs with a cost-efficient software solution, while keeping our infrastructure in place. It enables us to scale easily and affordably without affecting our system's performance. One of my main goals as IT director is to create an environment where new technologies can be quickly adopted. Red Hat Storage helps us stay ahead of the curve and is flexible enough to fit in with new technologies."

With Red Hat Storage Software Appliance, the Cornell Institute for Biotechnology and Life Science Technologies was able to lay the technology on its already existing disks, avoiding the potential high cost of deploying additional servers and storage hardware. With the elastic scaling capabilities provided by Red Hat Storage, the Institute removed the constraint and pain point of trying to manage unstructured data.

“Cornell was faced with a huge challenge; they needed high availability and scalability without using a large portion of the IT budget,” said Ranga Rangachari, general manager, Storage at Red Hat. “Red Hat Storage delivers the access their researchers need for data availability and the scalability to accommodate data growth at a cost that meets business needs.”

Red Hat Storage Software Appliance lets enterprises deploy storage the same way they deploy computing today–as a virtualized, commoditized and scale-on-demand pool, improving storage economics. Combined with the customer’s choice of commodity computing and storage resources, Red Hat Storage can scale-out to petabytes of capacity and GB/s of throughput at a lower cost than proprietary systems. Red Hat Storage offers high availability with n-way replication both within and between public and private data centers. Red Hat Storage Software Appliance is deployable both on-premise (as a virtual appliance or bare-metal software appliance) and in public clouds such as Amazon Web Services. Red Hat Storage is the primary author and maintainer of the open-source GlusterFS software.

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Source: Red Hat