Data Direct Networks Powers a 100-Petabyte Cloud

DataDirect Networks (DDN) announced that University College London (UCL) has selected DDN to provide up to 3,000 researchers with a safe and resilient storage solution, that is expected to scale up to 100 Petabytes.

The first phase of the UCL project for enabling researchers to share, reuse and preserve project-based research data will use DDN object storage technology to store up to 600TB of research data.

UCL sought to remove the burden of storing and preserving research data from individual researchers and in doing so, lower the barriers of sharing and exploiting vital findings in order to improve research outcomes and overcome problems of global significance. With DDN WOS (Web Object Scaler) distributed object storage architecture, GRIDScaler parallel file storage system and tight integration with the Integrated Rule-Oriented Data Management Solution (iRODS), UCL forecasts it will save money --up to hundreds of thousands of UK pounds -- by slashing hardware, power and staffing costs, as well as maintenance fees, associated with attaining and maintaining personal data stores across 100 departments, institutes and research centers.

“We were very interested in building a relationship with a strong storage partner to fill our technology gap," said Dr. J. Max Wilkinson, Head of Research Data Services for University College London’s Information Services Division. "After a thorough assessment, DDN met our technical requirements and shared our data storage vision. In evaluating DDN, we agreed that the WOS solution had a simple proposition, was high performance and had low administration overhead.”