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 and prospecting, the Vrije Universiteit Brussel selected Syneto HA Series storage. Built with two 60-bay JBODs, the solution delivers an impressive 200TB of efficient, easy-to-use and resilient storage — engineered for very easy capacity upgrades and ready to scale into the petabyte range without expensive forklift upgrades.
The 200TB cluster serves thousands of existing local and remote users while reserving headroom for thousands more. Syneto systems are crafted for very easy capacity upgrades, so VUB can grow into PB ranges without disruptive forklift replacements.
Designed for mission-critical environments, the HA Series provides a complete Business Continuity solution built on a multi-node high-availability cluster. It offers multiple pathways to data while watching for failures at every level — keeping research data always accessible.
A compound approach protects data from the moment it enters the system and throughout its lifetime. Data is shielded at the block level against silent corruption all the way up the filesystem hierarchy, reinforced by scheduled fast snapshots.
Workloads balance across cluster nodes, while hybrid storage pools built on SSDs form a fast cache that keeps "hot" data available to researchers. In-line compression shrinks the footprint and deduplication clears away duplicate data blocks.
Two nodes form the HA cluster, attached to two 60-bay JBODs for 200TB of capacity, with a fast SSD cache layer and in-line deduplication and compression throughout.
With the Syneto HA Series in production, the T2B project replaced an unstable infrastructure with a resilient, mission-critical foundation. The research team now benefits from one of the best cost-to-quality ratios on the market, Business Continuity through an affordable high-availability cluster, and storage efficiency that frees up to 50% of capacity.
Multiple pathways to data and failure monitoring at every level mean T2B users can be certain their research data is accessible — 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 and no expensive forklift replacements.
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| 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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How Syneto delivered a 200TB multi-node high-availability storage cluster for the T2B high-energy physics computing facility within IIHE.
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