Case Study: British Antarctic Survey achieves 10x capacity boost and scalable hybrid flash storage for surging scientific data with DataDirect Networks

British Antarctic Survey - Customer Case Study

The British Antarctic Survey (BAS), a leading environmental research center running Antarctic stations, ships and aircraft, faced rapidly accelerating data growth—collecting 10× more data than a decade ago and expecting year-over-year doubling—driven largely by extensive sensor arrays and compute-heavy scientific modeling. A small IT team needed a high-performance, redundant storage solution that fit tight space, power and budget constraints while supporting a move to the Lustre parallel file system and an expanding VMware environment.

BAS selected DataDirect Networks’ SFA7700X hybrid flash storage with Lustre, leveraging a high-density, pay-as-you-grow design and a mix of SSD and rotating media. The deployment replaced a 30U/50TB rack with a 16U/650TB system (a 10× capacity boost) and can scale to about 1.5PB in the same footprint, improving data ingest, analysis and global collaboration for climate models (WRF, MITgcm, BLAST) and covering roughly two years of aggressive growth.

British Antarctic Survey

Jeremy Robst

IT Support Engineer and Head of Unix Systems