University uses cloud to unleash research potential The University of Alabama at Birmingham gives scientists a massive, on-demand, virtual storage cloud using OpenStack at less than $0.41 per gigabyte to accelerate discoveries “Researchers can save their genetic-sequencing workflows to reuse with new devices and analysis methods … because we give them an affordable, long- term storage option with our Dell private cloud.” John-Paul Robinson, System Architect, Research Computing, The University of Alabama at Birmingham Business need The University of Alabama at Birmingham needed affordable, scalable and easy-to-use storage to support the dynamic needs of researchers trying to uncover new scientific insights. Solution IT staff deployed a private storage cloud using the Dell TM OpenStack- Powered Cloud Solution, based on Dell servers, storage, networking and services — as well as OpenStack TM , Ceph® and Dell Crowbar software. Benefits • University has easy-to-use, on- demand storage for less than $0.41 per GB • Researchers can achieve more and spend less time managing data • University can easily adapt resources and maximize investments • IT staff can quickly add capacity, services and capabilities • UAB contributes to the OpenStack community by enhancing the Dell cloud solution Solutions featured • Dell OpenStack-Powered Cloud Solution • High-Performance Computing • Deployment Services • Storage Virtualization Customer profile Company The University of Alabama at Birmingham Industry Higher Education Country United States Employees 19,246 Website www.uab.edu
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University uses cloud to unleash research potentialThe University of Alabama at Birmingham gives scientists a massive, on-demand, virtual storage cloud using OpenStack at less than $0.41 per gigabyte to accelerate discoveries
“Researchers can save their genetic-sequencing workflows to reuse with new devices and analysis methods … because we give them an affordable, long-term storage option with our Dell private cloud.”
John-Paul Robinson, System Architect, Research Computing, The University of Alabama at Birmingham
More than 100 faculty and students use the university’s high-performance computing (HPC) clusters to gain new scientific insights by analyzing petabytes (PB) of information. Storing data sets, which range in size from gigabytes (GB) to terabytes (TB), was a constant challenge. To work, researchers had to continually move increasing amounts of data around to available storage resources. John-Paul Robinson, system architect of research computing at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, says, “People often had to reduce the amount of research that they could do at one time because we had a limited storage footprint. There was too much needless effort being put into a problem that could be solved efficiently with a consistent storage model.”
University overcomes data challenges with a private storage cloud solutionTo resolve its data issues, UAB implemented a private storage cloud based on the Dell™ OpenStack-Powered Cloud Solution. It combines the cost-saving benefits of open-source software and a fully supported reference architecture from Dell. “Cloud in a box’ is a fairly accurate way of describing the Dell private cloud solution,” says Doug Rigney, PhD, interim vice president for information technology at UAB. “It was the perfect fit for the model we wanted.”
The more than 400-TB virtual storage pool is supported by 12 Dell PowerEdge R720 rack servers running the open-source cloud operating system, OpenStackTM software. The servers are interconnected using a 10-gigabit
Ethernet (GbE) fabric based on a Dell Networking S4810 low-latency, top-of-rack, 10GbE switch that’s specifically designed for high-performance data centers. Storage services are provided by Ceph, an open-source, unified-storage software platform offered by Dell technology partner, Inktank. Based on a scale-out architecture, Ceph distributes storage processing across numerous servers and can seamlessly scale to accommodate petabytes of data. To use the solution, researchers simply provision object-, block-, and file-based resources.
IT personnel speed efficiency, implementing the cloud in three daysUAB implemented its private cloud in
The University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) is a world-
renowned research institution and one of 11 universities in
the nation to earn a Beckman Scholars Award for training
undergraduate researchers. To continue pushing the boundaries
of science in areas such as DNA mapping, UAB needed an
affordable and scalable storage solution to meet the unpredictable
needs of researchers — on demand. By doing so, the university
could achieve more by spending less time managing data.
Technology at work
Services
DellTM Support Services
- Dell Deployment Services
- Dell ProSupport
Hardware
Dell PowerEdge R720 rack servers
Dell Networking S4810 10GbE switch
Software
Dell Crowbar
Inktank® Ceph®
OpenStackTM software
“Cloud in a box’ is a fairly accurate way of describing the Dell private cloud solution. It was the perfect fit for the model we wanted.”
Doug Rigney, PhD, Interim Vice President for Information Technology and CIO, The University of Alabama at Birmingham
just three days by taking advantage of the solution’s reference architecture, best-practice guides, the Dell Crowbar open-source operations platform and Dell Deployment Services. For example, IT staff significantly reduced complexity with Dell Crowbar, which they can use to automate deployment and management processes across all layers of the cloud infrastructure. IT staff can also save time and effort in the long term because all solution components are backed by Dell ProSupport Services. “I’ve been pleasantly surprised that I can go to the Dell support site and be routed to the correct person right away when I had questions about OpenStack and Crowbar,” explains Robinson. University provides easy-to-use storage for less than $0.41 per GB Researchers now have a convenient, cost-effective storage option, which is easily accessed from across the campus-wide network, but housed and managed centrally within the same high performance computing (HPC) environment they use for large-scale data analysis. “We’re now able to charge about $400 per terabyte, per year, with our Dell private cloud, which is a little less than .41 cents per gigabyte,” says Robinson. “The actual cost depends on how many physical disks a user selects to store each byte of data.” In addition, students and staff can glean more insight from the data they collect. “Researchers can save their genetic-sequencing workflows to reuse with new devices and analysis methods or they can share with others, because we give them an affordable, long-term storage option with our Dell private cloud.” Researchers can accelerate research with a growing set of on-demand services To give users an à la carte menu for storage provisioning and services, IT personnel customized the OpenStack console using built-in APIs. David Shealy, PhD, faculty director, research computing and chairman of the Department of Physics at UAB, explains,
“We’ve made it possible for users to satisfy their own storage needs with the Dell private cloud so that their research is not hampered by IT.” As a result, researchers can now focus on making new discoveries rather than wasting precious time pinpointing available storage capacity, moving expanding data sets to different resources and managing other data-related IT tasks such as backups. Scientists and students can also now work with larger, more-diverse and sophisticated data sets, further enhancing the scope and depth of research that they can undertake. Because the storage cloud is highly scalable and flexible, the university can also expand its service offerings faster and take advantage of new opportunities. “We added a user-driven backup service to our OpenStack console in an afternoon’s worth of work because we have our Dell network fabric in place,” Robinson says. By simplifying high availability with a backup service, researchers can now qualify for grants that require demonstrated levels of data protection. University maximizes investments and facilitates future growth Today, the cloud contains 400 TB of capacity and it can scale to accommodate 5 PB. However, on-demand storage is only the first of many new services that UAB wants to add to enhance research capabilities and efficiency. For example, by building its private cloud on standard Dell x86 servers, IT personnel can use it for both storage and computation. “In total, our Dell private cloud solution includes 192 cores, over a terabyte of RAM, and 432 raw terabytes of storage capacity,” says Robinson. “That’s a lot of power attached to disks, and this density lets us achieve a multi-use scenario.” By creating a cloud-centric, HPC environment powered by Dell servers, UAB can provide a more usable and flexible HPC environment. This is significant because in the past, users
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often spent hours recreating analysis environments to run on the HPC cluster, especially if they were using an operating system or toolset that wasn’t already running on the cluster. “We envision the OpenStack-based cloud to act as the gateway to our HPC resources, not only as the purveyor of services we provide, but also enabling users to build their own cloud-based services,” Robinson explains. “With their own configurable test, development, and compute environment running in the cloud, users will have the power to combine their workflows, their data, and their applications into web-accessible services that are seamlessly integrated with the university’s HPC resources.” UAB contributes to the OpenStack community by enhancing the Dell cloud solution As a technology pioneer, UAB helps the public by making scientific discoveries and modeling innovative uses of technology. Robinson explains that another benefit of building its storage cloud on the Dell Open-Stack Powered Solution is that IT personnel can help
shape it, and by doing so, help other organizations achieve more. For example, to accelerate the time to results, UAB worked with Dell to customize the reference architecture so that it uses a 10GbE switch rather than the original 1GbE design to connect the HPC cluster and storage cloud. By doing so, researchers can load data sets from cloud storage into the HPC cluster faster and avoid the delays previously caused by having to repeatedly move large data sets across the university’s campus network. “We didn’t just want to buy a solution that we had no say or control over,” Robinson says. “We worked with Dell and Inktank to certify a Dell Networking S4810 switch in the OpenStack reference configuration so that it better met our needs. This sort of collaboration is a really a big win for us because we can engage in the solution’s upstream development and help evolve it to meet our constantly changing requirements — and those of the open-source community.”
“We’ve made it possible for users to satisfy their own storage needs with the Dell private cloud so that their research is not hampered by IT.”
David L. Shealy, PhD,Faculty Director, Research Computing and Chairman of the Department of Physics, The University of Alabama at Birmingham
