Case Study -
University-Wide Federated Storage and Archive
The Opportunity
A university with 115,000 students and faculty on seven campuses has petabytes of storage scattered through a maze of departmental fiefdoms. The university wants to unify the storage systems to enable inter-departmental, permission-based sharing of files without losing departmental independence.
Further, changing regulatory requirements are forcing the creation of a highly reliable long-term archive for an extensive and detailed student record system.
Plus, dramatically strengthened and oft-changing privacy rules, with growing penalties for non-compliance, are making security, particularly access control, an issue that demands a global solution, particularly with regard to student records.
The Twisted Storage Solution
Twisted Storage will unite the university's many isolated departmental storage systems into a single federated enterprise storage cloud with as many sub-clusters as needed to protect sensitive data and maintain departmental independence. It can also be configured to provide one or more umbrella clusters that enable polcy-driven file sharing across clusters and/or globally. The x509 certificate-based access control system within Twisted Storage provides strong authentication and regulatory compliance support.
The global indexing and search feature in Twisted Storage solves the most basic of file sharing problems - you cannot share what you cannot find. The data and metadata of all existing files are indexed as each legacy server is added to the Twisted Storage enterprise cloud which immediately enables global search.
Automated workflows driven by policies can migrate data to lower cost storage systems based on frequency of use or other factors. File retention can also be policy-driven to comply with regulatory requirements. Changing requirements can be accommodated with simple, on-the-fly changes to specific policies.
The university's privacy requirements will be supported by the x509 authentication mechanism and the provided encryption algorithms.
