Case Study: Purdue University achieves 900% faster data access and accelerated research results with DataDirect Networks' SFA12KX and SFX

Purdue University - Customer Case Study

Purdue University, a top-tier research institution with more than 400 labs and 140 research centers, needed scalable, high-performance storage to support roughly 1,000 researchers across several hundred concurrent projects. The university’s Data Depot had to handle diverse workloads—from very large parallel I/O jobs to millions of small, random read requests—without creating performance bottlenecks or risking data availability.

Purdue deployed two DDN SFA12KX systems (6.4 PB raw) with DDN’s SFX cache acceleration and GPFS to provide a centralized, highly available file system. The solution serves ~90% of random read I/Os from cache, cuts simple query times from two minutes to two seconds (a 900% improvement), delivers up to 300× more IOPS versus rotating media, and accelerated time-to-results for hundreds of projects while keeping cost-per-performance competitive.

Purdue University

Mike Shuey

Research Infrastructure Architect