Case Study: Center for Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets, University of Kansas achieves scalable, 3x faster data ingestion and cost-effective multi-tier storage with Quantum Corporation's StorNext

Center for Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets, University of Kansas - Customer Case Study

The Center for Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets (CReSIS) at the University of Kansas develops radar systems to map Greenland and Antarctic ice and supports large-scale climate research. As radar resolution improved, mission data grew from gigabytes to as much as 150 TB per flight, overwhelming an aging file system that limited pool size and IOPS; with a small IT team and roughly 80% of data cold, CReSIS needed higher throughput, easier multi-tier data management, and a cost-effective way to scale.

CReSIS implemented Quantum StorNext scale‑out storage (including a metadata appliance, primary disk, and tape archives) to provide a single shared namespace and policy-driven tiering. The change let them consolidate many more drives into one file system (about 600 vs. 100), triple storage performance to speed ingest and HPC workflows, simplify administration, and cut costs by moving cold data to economical tape while enabling rapid, scalable growth.

Center for Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets, University of Kansas

Riley Epperson

IT Engineer