Case Study -
Repurposing Spare Servers into On-Line Archive
The Opportunity
A large biotech firm was planning a major upgrade to some purpose-built systems. The upgrade would, over a preictable time period, free up 40 Sun "Thumper" servers that are currently running the Solaris operating system. The firm wants to convert them to a 0.5 PB on-line archive that will expand over time to an aggregate capacity of many petabytes.
The Twisted Storage Solution
The spare servers can be turned into Twisted Storage server nodes as they become available. The first available server can be configured stand-alone and each additional one added to the federated enterprise storage cloud as it becomes available. Turning each server into a Twisted Storage Node takes less than ten minutes and can be done while the rest of the Twisted Storage system continues to operate normally.
In addition to federating the spare servers into a single enterprise storage cloud, Twisted Storage also provides policy-driven workflow and global indexing and search. Twisted Storage's ability to modify policies that have been applied to stored files greatly eases the burden caused by frequent chanegs of regulations and company policies.