Space: The Final High-Performance Frontier
In this series of customer success stories, including Colby Sawyer College Delivers Continuous Data Availability with DataCore Software, This Hyperconverged Virtual SAN Solution Saves Lives, and How to Simplify Your Storage Strategy in Healthcare, we wanted you to hear how our software-defined solutions are game-changers across virtually every industry. In this research-technology scenario, you can see that performance and availability are challenges for every industry—even NASA.
The John C. Stennis Space Center (SSC), located in southern Mississippi, is one of 18 facilities throughout the country operated by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). SSC is NASA’s largest and primary testing facility for rocket propulsion systems. To effectively test their rocket propulsion systems, NASA SSC needed better application availability and performance from its data storage infrastructure both before and after the testing.
As the data center continued to grow and become more of a critical service to the space center, Stennis Space Center needed a storage solution that could provide the continuous availability and speed it required. The systems integrator ASRC Federal, working with the space center, reached out to DataCore for a high-performance, high-availability software-defined storage (SDS) solution.
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DataCore [virtualization software] meets the high performing, fail-safe criteria the space center requires
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Virtualization Software Lets NASA SSC IT Do More with Less
After implementing a software-defined storage solution (SDS), the SSC was empowered to deliver the high availability and better overall performance it needed while enabling risk avoidance. In addition, the DataCore™ SANsymphony™ solution also allowed for improved capacity management and data storage utilization as well as hardware independence and flexibility when upgrading. Storage resources are now easier to manage and easier to scale, which drive cost savings and protects current and future IT investments.
“Because each rocket engine test can cost upwards of $1,000,000, it is critical that the numerous IT functions on which these trials depend be available and running for the 72 hours prior to the test, during the exercise, and for the 72 hours afterwards,” says David Oakes, ASRC’s Systems Support Manager at Stennis Space Center. “DataCore [virtualization software] meets the high performing, fail-safe criteria the space center requires with so much money at stake. It can bypass any storage glitches to keep the tests running without interruption.”
According to Lamar Nicholson, a storage and virtual environment architect, “Virtualization helped us realize tremendous business value from relatively modest assets. Virtualizing our servers and storage has truly enabled us to do more with less, reduce labor-intensive maintenance and realize a more agile IT infrastructure.
“DataCore is definitely one of the main reasons our mission-critical apps run faster; the SANsymphony caching and performance acceleration capabilities play a vital role. Moreover, DataCore makes great use of the SSDs to further boost performance.
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Get more details on the NASA Space Center case study here!
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