Case Study: British Antarctic Survey achieves scalable high-performance big data storage with DDN

British Antarctic Survey - Customer Case Study

British Antarctic Survey faced rapidly escalating data storage demands from Antarctic expeditions, scientific modeling, and global research collaborations, with data volumes growing far faster than its existing infrastructure could handle. The Cambridge-based research center also needed a solution that fit tight limits on space, power, and budget while supporting Lustre and VMware environments. DDN was the vendor selected, with its SFA7700X hybrid flash storage appliance and customer-provided Lustre parallel file system.

DDN implemented the SFA7700X to give British Antarctic Survey high-performance, scalable storage in a compact footprint, combining flash and HDD capacity for better price-performance and reliability. The result was up to 1.5PB of storage capacity, a 10x increase in usable capacity from a 30U/50TB rack to a 16U/650TB rack, and enough room to support at least two years of aggressive growth without expanding the storage footprint.

British Antarctic Survey

Jeremy Robst

IT Support Engineer and Head of Unix Systems