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
Customer profile
Company The University of Alabama at
Birmingham
Industry Higher Education
Country United States
Employees 19,246
Website www.uab.edu
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 DellTM OpenStackPowered Cloud Solution, based on
Dell servers, storage, networking and
services — as well as OpenStackTM,
Ceph® and Dell Crowbar software.
Benefits
“Researchers can save their genetic-sequencing
workflows to reuse with new devices and analysis
methods … because we give them an affordable, longterm storage option with our Dell private cloud.”
John-Paul Robinson, System Architect, Research Computing, The University of
Alabama at Birmingham
• University has easy-to-use, ondemand 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
The University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) is a worldrenowned 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.
“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
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 solution
To resolve its data issues, UAB
implemented a private storage cloud
based on the Dell™ OpenStackPowered 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.”
Ethernet (GbE) fabric based on a Dell
Networking S4810 low-latency, topof-rack, 10GbE switch that’s specifically
designed for high-performance data
centers. Storage services are provided
by Ceph, an open-source, unifiedstorage 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 days
UAB implemented its private cloud in
Technology at work
Services
DellTM Support Services
- Dell Deployment Services
- Dell ProSupport
Hardware
Dell PowerEdge R720 rack
servers
Dell Networking S4810 10GbE
switch
Software
The more than 400-TB virtual storage
pool is supported by 12 Dell PowerEdge
R720 rack servers running the opensource cloud operating system,
OpenStackTM software. The servers
are interconnected using a 10-gigabit
2
Dell Crowbar
Inktank® Ceph®
OpenStackTM software
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,
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“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, morediverse 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, ondemand 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
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 opensource community.”
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© October 2013, Dell Inc. Dell, ProSupport and PowerEdge are trademarks of Dell Inc. Inktank and Ceph are
trademarks of Inktank Storage, Inc.OpenStack is a registered trademark of the OpenStack Foundation in the
United States and other countries. This case study is for informational purposes only.
DELL MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS CASE STUDY. Reference number: 10012807
“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