University of Giessen

Justus Liebig University Giessen is a large public research institution in Germany that develops software to analyze the genetic material of microorganisms that affect medicine and biotechnology. For the extensive storage capabilities that are needed to serve customers and collaborators, the university's Institute for Systems Biology relies on scale-out, all-flash storage from NetApp SolidFire.

Researchers bring varied use cases and application scenarios to the center's infrastructure services. Some have datasets of just a few dozen gigabytes; others have datasets of hundreds of gigabytes. Some projects are conducted in a cloud environment; others use a traditional client-server architecture and high-performance computing. The center must accommodate all of them with reliable 24/7 access despite the growing overall demand and unpredictable workload surges.

The center's traditional NFS and FAS solutions did not provide the required high reliability, easy integration with OpenStack and VMware, high I/O performance, seamless scalability, and easy maintenance by a small team of system administrators. After evaluating nearly a dozen storage solution options—all-flash, hyper converged, and others—the center chose scale-out, all-flash storage from NetApp SolidFire.