Nexenta, the global leader in Software-Defined Storage (SDS) (#softwaredefinedstorage) solutions, today announced it was chosen by the Faculty of Physics at Ludwig Maximilian University (LMU), one of Europe’s premier academic and research institutions, to support its IT environment.

LMU is the second largest university in Germany with over 50,000 students. It attracts inspired scholars and talented students from all over the world and is a global powerhouse for physics research and education, with over 34 Nobel laureates associated with it.

With eight different sites in and around Munich, the university faced a daily battle to provide fast and efficient service to its students and staff. Leveraging a central data center was not possible due to the demand for low latency. Additionally, each site has different requirements, making it impossible to settle on a single, central solution. The university’s diverse IT environments were previously supported by countless storage solutions from a variety of hardware vendors, meaning that capacity ran high and performance often suffered. LMU required a reliable IT system that was flexible, could handle the large workloads and would enable the university to continue to expand.

Searching for a solution, Klaus Steinberger, Head of IT, attended a seminar on SDS by Nexenta. He explained: “We decided straight away to test the NexentaStor solution and we liked what we saw. It was incredibly powerful, self healing and very flexible.”

After installing one NexentaStor system in 2012, the IT team now has over seven systems with a combined capacity of 380TB. The solution has allowed the faculty to enjoy the high availability demanded, with added flexibility. Using SDS avoids vendor lock-in, so the department is not tied to any single, expensive solution. The flexibility to use standard hardware has prompted the university to look at implementing SDS across its other departments, with the Faculty of Mathematics, Information Technology and Statistics already installing their first NexentaStor systems.

Nexenta’s partner in Munich, BASIS GmbH, delivered and integrated the solutions at the faculty. Stefan Fisher, CEO at BASIS said: “For the faculty, NexentaStor is simply the best solution. The flexibility means it can use one system for different purposes and doesn’t have to work with different management platforms. Price was not the deciding factor as the enormous performance of the systems was convincing enough, but saving some budget was the icing on the cake.”

Mark Jordan, VP, GM, EMEA, Nexenta said: “LMU is a leading institution and with services to over 50,000 students, it is essential the department could handle the large workloads. It is great to see that NexentaStor helped achieve this and provided extra flexibility, and lower total cost. LMU can now rest assured it is not tied into any vendor lock in and can choose any standard hardware upgrade when needed, which is ideal for such a fast paced and diverse university.”

For further information please read the full case study in English and the full case study in German.