Isilon has revealed that the UCLA Laboratory of Neuro Imaging (LONI), home of the world's largest collection of research neuroimages, has deployed Isilon scale-out storage to power its research into Alzheimer's disease, schizophrenia and other neurological disorders.
Using Isilon's SmartPools software, LONI has unified three performance tiers of Isilon scale-out storage into a single file system, simplifying data management to drive increased efficiency, cost-savings and application performance. With SmartPools, LONI has consolidated all of its file-based operations onto a central, shared storage pool, aligning application needs with system resources to improve utilisation and reduce costs.
'Our lab supports data-intensive research initiatives the world over, making efficient data management key to our success,' said David Hasson, director of IT ay LONI. 'As a result of implementing SmartPools, we've maintained our ability to fine-tune even the lowest level of granularity, while obviating the need to micromanage the storage cluster. It's an incredible boon for productivity and has allowed us to focus more time on addressing the many other technical facets of our institution, which has ultimately led to a tremendous increase in research.'
Leveraging its 5,000-plus compute-core Linux cluster and massive repository of 2D and 3D neuroimages, LONI supports an international research community with sophisticated image analysis, web-based image access and a variety of analytic tools and research best practices. LONI deployed Isilon's SmartPools application to unify its three performance tiers into a single file system and point of management, driving increased simplicity and efficiency across its data centre. With SmartPools, LONI has eliminated manual data migration between storage tiers, reducing overall system management to less than an hour per week and improving data access for its diverse ecosystem of research groups, collaborating scientists and partner organisations.
