Case Study: Ruhr-University Bochum (ICAMS) achieves predictable, high-performance, cost-effective storage with NexentaStor (Nexenta)

Ruhr-University Bochum Switches to SDS with Nexenta to Keep in Line with Budgets

ICAMS at Ruhr-University Bochum is an interdisciplinary research institute that runs large-scale materials simulation on a 4,500+ core HPC cluster and a separate student network. As student demand and data sizes grew, ICAMS needed a predictably priced, high-performance storage solution with reliable support to avoid the rising lifecycle and support costs they experienced with legacy vendors and to prevent slowdowns during concurrent student access and post‑processing.

MEGWARE deployed NexentaStor on standard Supermicro hardware with Hitachi drives (≈64TB, 256GB RAM), using ZFS, hybrid caching and compression. The system was migrated and put into service quickly, delivering higher throughput for post‑processing, fast concurrent access for students, better capacity efficiency through compression and snapshots, and predictable, lower lifecycle costs with strong vendor support.

Ruhr University Bochum

Caesar

IT Administrator