Case Study: Argonne National Laboratory achieves reliable high-capacity climate data storage in harsh environments with Nexsan Unity

Nexsan Unity™ Delivers in Support of Atmospheric Radiation Measurement Program for Argonne National Laboratory

Argonne National Laboratory, working through its Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Climate Research Facility, needed dependable storage for climate data collection in extremely harsh remote environments. The sites operate on ships, in arctic locations, and generator-powered facilities with dirty power, outages, vibration, and temperature swings, while ingesting data from multiple instruments at rates ranging from 4K to 4GB per hour. Nexsan Unity was chosen to meet these durability, reliability, capacity, and performance requirements.

Nexsan deployed Unity systems at 7 locations with a combined 1PB of raw capacity and over 1PB total across the installation, delivering high-density storage in just 12U where other vendors needed 20U. The solution proved stable, easy to deploy, and able to keep up with the application workload while supporting replication and NFS exports. According to Argonne, Nexsan has caused no serious failures or downtime in the field, giving the ARM program a reliable storage platform for mission-critical climate research.

Argonne National Laboratory

Cory Stuart

ARM Site Data System and Cyber Security Manager