The VUB and IIHE adopted a Syneto HA Series cluster to scale capacity, establish Business Continuity through a high-availability architecture and ensure complete data protection for their T2B computing facility.
Founded in 1970, the Vrije Universiteit Brussel is a Flemish public teaching and research university that was the first in Belgium to establish a research council. It hosts around 150 research groups, 14,000 students and an academic and scientific staff of over 3,200 people. Its Elementary Particle Physics (ELEM) research team studies the most elementary building blocks of matter within the framework of the Interuniversity Institute for High Energies (IIHE).
The research programs rely on the high-energy particle accelerators and experimental facilities at CERN (Switzerland) and DESY (Germany), as well as on non-accelerator experiments at the South Pole. T2B — the project in which Syneto was engaged — is a collaboration within IIHE between six universities to deploy a large computing facility able to support the huge amounts of data generated by these high-energy physics experiments.
The existing infrastructure was becoming unstable and unresponsive under a growing number of local and remote users — already over 60 on-site and thousands off-site — all needing access to the same storage resources.
Cutting-edge scientific work generates large amounts of data that must be processed, stored and compared. Guaranteeing stable data access demanded a multi-node clustered approach delivering both performance and redundancy.
At the forefront of particle physics, the VUB and IIHE wanted equally cutting-edge storage — a system able to protect against every kind of disaster and data corruption, with native high redundancy and no added complexity or cost.
Processing speed is crucial for comparing results and advancing the project. The storage had to handle intense workloads from repeated calculations, keep "hot" data instantly reachable and offer data efficiency features to keep a low footprint.
After rigorous testing, the Vrije Universiteit Brussel selected Syneto HA Series storage. Built with two 60-bay JBODs, it delivers 200TB of efficient, easy-to-use and resilient storage, ready to scale into the petabyte range.
The 200TB cluster serves thousands of existing local and remote users with headroom for thousands more, and upgrades easily into PB ranges without disruptive forklift replacements.
Built for mission-critical environments, the HA Series delivers Business Continuity on a multi-node high-availability cluster: multiple pathways to data plus failure monitoring at every level keep research data accessible.
Data is protected from the moment it enters the system and throughout its lifetime: block-level shielding against silent corruption up the whole filesystem hierarchy, reinforced by scheduled fast snapshots.
Workloads balance across cluster nodes, while SSD-based hybrid pools form a fast cache keeping "hot" data available to researchers. In-line compression shrinks the footprint and deduplication removes duplicate blocks.
With the Syneto HA Series in production, the T2B project replaced an unstable infrastructure with a resilient, mission-critical foundation for high-energy physics research.
Multiple pathways to data and failure monitoring at every level give T2B users the reliability, availability and serviceability a mission-critical facility demands.
The 200TB cluster serves the existing local and remote user base while reserving capacity for thousands of future users, with easy upgrades into the petabyte range.
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Single-vendor support — one contract, one phone number, one SLA for the entire stack. Three response tiers, all delivered by Syneto engineers in your language.
| Plan | Response | Coverage | Who it's for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Essential | NBD — 8×5 | Software + hardware | Branch offices, test & dev |
| Business | 4 h — 24×7 | Software + hardware | Production workloads |
| Mission-Critical | 1 h — 24×7 | Software + hardware + TAM | Business-critical sites, DR |
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