The European university client is a research-oriented reform university that accepts its responsibility to society by providing high-quality research and educational opportunities. It is committed to the basic idea behind a university, in that in order to generate scientific knowledge, close links between research and teaching have to be cultivated. Current and future social challenges are addressed through the university’s research and study programs.
As the university’s existing storage system approached the end of its lifecycle, the IT team faced two pressing challenges: aging infrastructure and rapidly expanding capacity demands. To ensure continuity in both research and academic operations, a next-generation storage solution was needed — one that could not only replace the legacy system but also future-proof the university’s data backbone.
The new deployment had to satisfy a series of critical requirements. High availability was non-negotiable, with a robust Fibre Channel (FC) SAN architecture forming the foundation. The system also needed to provide multiple 16G FC SAN ports with multipathing, enabling seamless integration into the university’s existing stretched SAN that spans two separate buildings.
Certification and compatibility were equally important. The solution had to be fully certified for VMware environments, while also supporting a broad range of operating systems, including CentOS, Red Hat, Debian Linux, and Microsoft Windows Server. This flexibility would allow the university to maintain a diverse IT ecosystem without compromise.
Capacity and scalability were at the core of the evaluation process. The university required an initial 750 TB of usable capacity, with the ability to scale seamlessly to 3 PB as research and administrative workloads continue to expand. Beyond capacity, performance expectations were high: the system needed to guarantee sustained throughput with fixed maximum latencies, ensuring reliable performance beyond short-lived cache or tiering bursts.
Finally, resilience under pressure was a must. The solution had to deliver short RAID rebuild times even under full load, minimizing risk and downtime in the event of hardware failures.
By defining these rigorous requirements, the university positioned itself to adopt a storage infrastructure capable of supporting its long-term mission — enabling research, education, and innovation without compromise.
With the requirement of a purchase through a public tender and a tight budget, the storage experts in Zstor GmbH had to design a cost-effective storage solution to meet all needs.
QSAN offered a compelling HA dual SAN Controller that supports all requested features of both hard- and software, with a full certification for VMware. Pairing this with the Western Digital Ultrastar Data60 enclosures allowed for the high capacity demands and future upgradeability and extensions. With 120x 12TB HDDs per dual controller, the demanded performance was met at all times even without hitting the cache. The RAID60EE technology also allowed for both space- and cost-savings, while significantly reducing RAID rebuild times and impacts on daily operations.
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