Lisa Vaas reports in eweek on the solution implemented by The Genome Sequencing Center at the Washington University Medical School for its burgeoning data proliferation problem. In the ten years of its existence, the center's data store has grown from roughly a GB to somewhere in the neighborhood of eight TB.

Initially, the center had used Oracle HA Cluster in a parallel-server setup. This implementation was costly because of the difficulty of setting up and administering Oracle HA and the requirement for keeping a second server idling in anticipation of the need for failover, Vaas reports. Given the system costs, the increasing size of the data store and the costs per piece of DNA mapped, the center found it necessary to move to another storage strategy.

The need for high availability, Vaas notes, is key to the center's mission. Given the costs of mapping DNA, it is equally critical that files be protected against loss. According to Kelly Carpenter, the center's senior technical manager, "You look at any file folder on the system, and, I figured it out, it comes out to about $200,000 for each. "You lose that, you lose $200,000," Carpenter said.

Turning to Oracle9i RAC (Real Application Clusters) managed with VERITAS Advanced Cluster, Database Edition heterogeneous file system software, the center found solutions that would provide a high availability environment that simultaneously cuts costs, boosts performance and enables staff to continue their research without concern for the security and size of the data store. System administration costs have also shrunk with the adoption of the VERITAS solution, Carpenter reports.

The center runs two four-processor Sun FireTM V880 servers in array, using VERITAS NetBackup software with FlashBackup and Shared Storage options to protect and restore some 285 million files. Since the migration to the current cluster and storage setup in June, the center credits the FlashBackup option with improving backup performance from 24 hours to four hours and with reducing its catalog from 150 GB to 30 GB.

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