Case Study: Georgia Tech builds a federated academic private cloud with SwiftStack

Georgia Institute of Technology - Customer Case Study

Georgia Institute of Technology needed a flexible, scalable storage foundation for its new VAPOR academic private cloud, supporting research, instruction, and a wide range of data types spread across departments and facilities. As the university expanded from VDI and HPC into a federated cloud model, it also faced the challenge of managing 5–6 PB of centrally stored research data plus another 1–2 PB scattered across laptops, workstations, and USB drives. SwiftStack was selected to provide the object storage platform for this initiative.

SwiftStack delivered a distributed and resilient object storage infrastructure based on OpenStack Swift and its management suite, with support for commodity hardware, existing storage reuse, and access through object HTTP APIs and filesystem gateways. This gave Georgia Tech a single pooled storage layer for long-term storage, curation, repositories, and Dropbox-like services, while lowering total cost of ownership and simplifying deployment. SwiftStack also enabled the university to scale storage across multiple departments and facilities, with automated replication for disaster recovery and a path toward future Spark-based analytics on stored research data.

Georgia Institute of Technology

Didier Contis

Director of Technology Services