Case Study -
Globally Federated Storage for a Research Institute
The Opportunity
A multinational research institute has far too many storage silos, each an isolated system, with no convenient way for all their scientists and technicians to share files and no way for their researchers to even find the files if they could share them. The total on-line capacity is 6 PB and growing steadily.
The institute's goals include creating multiple globally federated storage sub-systems, each with system-wide indexing and search, plus an "umbrella" system that provides a unified view and search capability for the files on all systems.
The institute also requires these systems be distributed around the world with files management that assures files will always be stored and/or migrated to the locations nearest the heaviest users.
All this must occur without a "bulldozer upgrade" or moving files.
The Twisted Storage Solution
Twisted Storage can quickly be added to each existing server and will index files on the existing drives - moving files and replacing hardware are unnecessary.
Each storage sub-system is a Twisted Storage cluster that scales independent of the other parts of the total system. The umbrella system is simply another cluster that aggregates the sub-systems into a global whole and can even have its own storage nodes that are independent of the sub-systems.
This configuration uses Twisted Storage's policy-driven workflow and global indexing and search to migrate files close to the heaviest users and to store multiple always-synchronized copies in each high-use location to minimize network traffic.