Case Study: Institut Laue-Langevin achieves high-availability, scalable storage and up to 40% cost savings with Nexenta

Nexenta Delivers Right Result for Renowned International Research Centre

The Institut Laue-Langevin (ILL) is an international neutron research centre in Grenoble serving 1,500 researchers and running ~100 physical servers, 150 VMs and 1,500 workstations across two data centres. Facing 25% annual user-data growth and unpredictable scientific data increases, the ILL needed a more scalable, highly available storage platform with snapshots and automatic failover that would centralize backups, avoid vendor lock‑in and be less costly and more flexible than expanding its existing NetApp solution.

Nexenta (recommended by Dell) delivered NexentaStor built on ZFS and deployed a MetroHA active‑active cluster across the two sites, integrating with the ILL’s Solaris environment. The solution provided instant failover, unlimited snapshots, easy customization and simplified single‑site management; migration took five days. Results included up to 40% lower cost than alternatives, faster performance, reduced management to about two hours per week, quick installation and elimination of the proprietary upgrade path.

The Institut Laue-Langevin

Stephane Armanet

IT Infrastructure Manager