SCM – Education (Big Data) – IOPstor storage solution for digitisation of documents.

Background
SCM digitises documents and data for various organisations. They needed a solution for centralising processing of all the data with concurrent 250 users. Currently they had deployed a QNAP 8 bay storage solution with 1tb* 8 SSD’s giving them a usage capacity of 6TB. They need larger storage ie. 12TB with mirror and stripping (Raid 10) but for it to be cost effective and not at an exorbitant expense as the 6TB SSD storage which they had created. It was important that the storage solution have endurance of 24*7 usage for concurrent 250 users in remote location with power fluctuation and speed for processing 5mb files per 40 seconds for 250users. They did not want to use any servers and purely use a centralised storage solution for their application. They also need expandability options for the storage solution.

Solution
IOPstor convinced them to take a POC and gave a storage solution in Gujarat for testing. Initially they were apprehensive as their storage solution from Qnap had all SSD/s. A 8 bay hybrid solution with a mirror and stripe pool was given for testing in their in-house lab. 1G * 4 ports for connectivity to infrastructure were provided. SSD caching for read and write were deployed in the box. They needed a solution which was hardware agnostic and not tied to any proprietary hardware. Speed was essential and capacity was required hence IOPstor gave them a hybrid solution with spindle SAS drives and SSD caching.

Results
They did the primary tests where they found that the IOPstor storage solutions was equal to the all flash SSD solution they ware using. After running a stress stress for 8 hours with continuous read write access they were shocked to see a 100 percent better performance compared to their previous all flash solution. They stimulated 250 user data within a small span of time and accessed the storage with this test with 100% accuracy and reliability. They also wanted to test the hardware agonistic feature of our storage for which they removed the hard drives and plugged into another machine and were able to access the data. Satisfied with the preliminary tests they finally confirmed the order and when the main deployment was to be done in a remote location the IOPstor storage solution was used by 250 people for 45 days 24* 7 in 2 shifts.