Johns Hopkins University Selects Avere to Power its Human Language Technology Center

Researcher Productivity Doubles with Avere

PITTSBURGH, PA– April 21, 2015 – Avere Systems, a leading provider of enterprise storage for the hybrid cloud, today announced that The Johns Hopkins University, a world leader in education, research and patient care, has increased research productivity at its Human Language Technology Center of Excellence (HLTCOE) by deploying Avere FXT Series Edge filers to help gain cutting-edge real-time insights from over 250 terabytes of speech, text and image data. This data is processed using a High Performance Compute cluster, consisting of 150 nodes and 2500 cores utilizing Sun Grid Engine and Hadoop. Johns Hopkins University has doubled its amount of HPC grid jobs from 1.2 to 2.4 million per month using the much more cost-effective Avere solution.
Prior to its deployment of Avere, Johns Hopkins faced an unmanageable level of demand on its IT infrastructure. “Bandwidth was saturated, and we were experiencing a rapidly lengthening queue for HPC grid jobs,” said Scott Roberts, IT Manager at HLTCOE. “The grid workload also impacted responsiveness to user desktops, slowing access to home directories. Our challenge was to find a solution that dramatically improved performance, but did not require a large upfront investment, a lot of on-going care and feeding, or expensive upgrades at future performance thresholds.”
After evaluating numerous high-end storage arrays, Johns Hopkins University selected and deployed an Avere FXT Edge filer cluster in conjunction with ZFS-based core filers. The combined solution helped the university both meet and exceed performance and cost objectives.
“Deploying an Avere cluster allowed us to double the number of jobs we can process, from 1.2 million per month to more than 2.4 million. Obtaining equivalent performance via a traditional storage array would have exceeded our entire annual IT budget by more than five times,” explained Roberts. “Avere met our performance requirements in a smaller footprint and assured incremental scalability that protects us against future out-of-band capital expenditures.”
“We’re proud and excited to be part of The Johns Hopkins University cutting edge research,” said Ron Bianchini, president and CEO of Avere Systems. “Using Avere, researchers are able to improve productivity to fuel research breakthroughs despite the uncertainties of a grant-based budget that can vary from year to year.”
Read the full case study here: http://www.averesystems.com/researcher-productivity-surges-with-big-performance-boost.