Avere Powers Active Archive Object Storage at University of Warsaw

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Today Avere Systems announced that the University of Warsaw’s leading scientific computing center selected Avere’s FXT Edge filers to enable seamless access to private object storage. The University’s Interdisciplinary Centre for Mathematical and Computational Modelling (ICM) uses Avere and Western Digital Active Archive System to deliver petabyte-scale storage for its big data research center project, OCEAN. The combined solution provides seven petabytes of usable archive capacity, ensuring reliable access to aging data and long-term availability for future research activities.

One of the challenges we face in enabling big data science is providing safe and affordable storage at petabyte scale,” said Dr. Marek Michalewicz, deputy director of ICM. “When the Avere and Western Digital team arrived, we were able to count time-to-completion in hours. Together, Avere and Western Digital let us take advantage of object storage efficiencies to support demand, delivering the capacity, performance and manageability that the OCEAN data center environment requires.”

University of Warsaw ICM’s OCEAN project, located in a dedicated big data research center, offers a high-performance computing (HPC) infrastructure for data collection, storage, curation and advanced analysis. When faced with the large project of building the entire facility and supercomputing infrastructure from the ground up in a short timeline, the university turned to Avere and Western Digital to help install the big data analytics archive. The archive provides multi-petabyte capacity for interdisciplinary teams representing more than 200 scientists and developers tackling compute and data-heavy research in bioinformatics, climate modeling, machine learning, among many other fields.

The combined capabilities of the Avere FXT Edge filer and Active Archive System provide maximum flexibility for enterprises to leverage the scalability and economics of cloud architectures, while preserving investments in file storage and applications. Users can deploy on-premises and remote cloud-scale file storage, as well as hybrid cloud-bursting models and easily enable organizations to integrate with existing systems using NFS, SMB and S3-compliant access protocols.

“For data centers that want to move from just storing old data to enabling big data applications, the Active Archive System is an object storage system that transforms silos of legacy data storage into cloud-scale data lakes,” said Joan Wrabetz, vice president of marketing, Data Center Systems, Western Digital. “The combined solution with Avere enables capture of data using standard interfaces like NFS while offering cloud-native application access via S3 for enabling data science.”

“In industries that rely heavily on high-performance infrastructure, Avere and Western Digital offer customers a path to quickly scale-out storage and accommodate data growth,” said Ron Bianchini, president and CEO of Avere Systems. “We are proud to provide the University of Warsaw with the scalability and capacity needed to support cutting-edge research for global scientific communities.”

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