Case Study: Purdue University achieves 900% faster data access with DDN storage and SFX caching technology

Purdue University - Customer Case Study

Purdue University needed a centralized, high-performance storage system to support up to 1,000 researchers and hundreds of concurrent projects across diverse workloads, from large parallel I/O jobs to millions of small random file reads. To meet the demands of its Data Depot research repository, Purdue turned to DDN and its storage and caching technology to improve scalability, reliability, and access speed.

DDN implemented a pair of SFA12KX storage systems with SFX cache acceleration, plus EXAScaler at additional sites, delivering 6.4PB of raw storage and a flexible platform for mixed research workloads. The results included a 900% improvement in read performance, simple data queries dropping from two minutes to two seconds, and up to 300x more IOPS, helping Purdue accelerate time to results for researchers.

Purdue University

Mike Shuey

Research Infrastructure Architect