Scalable & Highly Available: Storage Infrastructure for Scientific Workloads
To reliably support its data-driven research processes, Fraunhofer SCAI needed a modern storage solution that would remain flexible in a complex IT environment. The institute chose Open-E JovianDSS – a platform that combines performance, availability, and scalability. Today, this system forms the backbone of research and development, with intelligent snapshot usage, a scalable architecture, and noticeable relief for the IT team.
Read the case study to learn how Fraunhofer SCAI uses Open-E JovianDSS, what architecture was implemented, and what benefits have been achieved in day-to-day operations.
File size: 3.0 MB
Challenges
Fraunhofer SCAI required a powerful data storage solution for compute-intensive research projects with growing data volumes. The previous proprietary infrastructure was costly, inflexible, and offered only limited scalability. At the same time, the heterogeneous IT environment – including Windows, Linux, and macOS systems – and the parallel use by research, development, and operations posed high demands on availability, access, and data protection.
Solution
Fraunhofer SCAI implemented an Open-E JovianDSS Active-Active Cluster consisting of two high-performance bare-metal servers and four JBODs. The platform delivers a vendor-agnostic, highly available storage architecture with ZFS snapshots, automatic failover, and integrated backup strategy. Thanks to self-service recovery features, users can restore data independently, reducing the load on the IT department. The system has been expanded multiple times and now provides over 800 TB of usable capacity.
Results
Migrating to Open-E JovianDSS enabled Fraunhofer SCAI to modernize its storage infrastructure sustainably:
- Increased flexibility and scalability
- Reduced IT workload thanks to self-service snapshots
- Reliable data availability through ZFS & backup integration
- Future-proof capacity with room to grow
.PDF file, 3 MB
