University of Utah Marriott Library Deploys Qumulo Data-Aware Scale-Out NAS for Flexible, Fast and Highly Scalable Enterprise-Class Storage

Qumulo, the leader in data-aware scale-out NAS, announced that the University of Utah Marriott Library has selected Qumulo Core for an enterprise-class storage system that would significantly enhance functionality.

The University of Utah Marriott Library is at the forefront of digitizing and archiving media, from newspapers, thesis, research data, and books to analog or uncompressed film, photography, and video. It houses the Utah Digital Newspapers Project, which is the second-largest open access newspaper collection, next to the Library of Congress.

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The Marriott Library had significant storage capacity and performance requirements and needed a storage system that could scale gracefully to meet those requirements over time. Its original “homebrew” storage system consisting of a Supermicro server and cluster of inexpensive high-density disks served as a primary archival repository and the target for metadata tagging, making it central to the entire digitization initiative. Over time, the system experienced disk failures at a rate of about once per week, resulting in lost data and a restore from backup. Even after the Marriott Library’s, IT team upgraded the system architecture, one particularly bad failure wiped out the whole system.

The Marriott Library’s assistant head for systems development, Joel Hsia, set out to identify a new solution that would offer the enterprise-grade reliability, uptime, scalability and world-class support required, all within budget.

After considering scale-out NAS solutions from HP and EMC/Isilon, Hsia and his team ultimately selected Qumulo’s QC208 4U hybrid storage appliances. In addition to being massively scalable, impressively reliable and surprisingly affordable, Qumulo offered advanced data analytics and performance that Hsia’s team could leverage over time. Additionally, the Marriott Library was able to rapidly install, configure and deploy the new cluster – which was key to keeping the Marriott Library’s digitization initiative on track.

Qumulo Core has even allowed the Marriott Library to offload virtual machine datastores onto the Qumulo appliances, due to the extremely fast performance.

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“As we shift additional applications to point at the Qumulo cluster, I’m confident that backups are happening and the reliability and availability is there,” said Hsia. “It really helps not having to worry about that.”

Hsia has also been impressed with Qumulo’s proactive customer success team. “The Qumulo customer success team makes us very happy – they routinely see problems before we do, and in most instances are already working to resolve the issue before we’re even aware it exists,” said Hsia.

Hsia envisions Qumulo’s role in the Marriott Library’s infrastructure becoming larger and more important over time. He ultimately expects it to become their primary storage solution and looks forward to tapping the system’s data-aware capabilities to better manage and control access.

“Soon we won’t need anything else but backup, high-speed virtual storage, and Qumulo,” concluded Hsia.

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