Case Study: Ludovic Maxim University achieves 100% uptime and flexible, cost-effective Software-Defined Storage with Nexenta

Fakultät für Physik der LMU München setzt auf Software Defined Storage und wechselt zu NexentaStor

The Faculty of Physics at Ludwig‑Maximilian‑University Munich faced a distributed IT challenge: supporting more than 3,500 students and staff across eight sites with differing latency and storage requirements, while relying on a mix of vendor-specific solutions that complicated management and high‑availability needs for largely virtualized servers.

The faculty evaluated and deployed NexentaStor (a ZFS‑based Software Defined Storage) with BASIS, rolling out seven systems (380 TB total) including HA clusters and SSD/DRAM hybrid caching over 10GbE. The new SDS platform delivered transparent failover, unlimited snapshots and self‑healing data integrity, ensured near‑100% uptime for virtualized applications, boosted HPC performance, avoided vendor lock‑in and reduced lifecycle costs — leading other LMU faculties to adopt the solution as well.

Ludovic Maxim University

Klaus Steinberger

Head of IT of the Faculty , LMU