Dartmouth College fMRI Data Center: Case Study Brief
Business Issues
The Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) Data Center at Dartmouth College serves as a lynchpin for researchers and educators who study the operation of the brain. The center, which is part of Dartmouth's Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, acts as an international repository for the data from vast imagingstudies that probe the operation and development of the brain. The storage needs for the center are huge, and will only continue to grow.
Solutions
To meet its growing need for storage, the fMRI Data Center deployed a high-end storage solution based on technology from Sun Microsystems and StorageTek.
Financial Benefits
The use of tape technology for archived data has enabled the fMRI Data Center to avoid the high costs of purchasing additional disk-based storage for data that is accessed infrequently.
In a corresponding benefit, the small footprint of the L700e library allows the center to minimize the amount of floor space devoted to archived data. This is helping the center avoid a costly physical expansion of the datacenter to create space for more disk storage.
Meanwhile, the flexibility of the L700e library has enabled the fMRI Data Center to make use of a large supply of existing DLT tape cartridges while leaving open the option of later adding higher-capacity, higher-performance T9940B tape drives and cartridges. This flexibility will enable the center to extend the returnson its DLT tape investments and to simultaneously realize the gains brought by T9940B cartridges.
Business Benefits
The L700e tape library provides maximum storage capacity in a minimal footprint. With 100-GB tapes, the library can store more than 70 terabytes of uncompressed data. Over time, the fMRI Data Center expects to expand capacity of the library through the addition of StorageTek T9940B tape drives and cartridges. Each T9940B cartridge can store up to 200 gigabytes of uncompressed data, and 2 to 3 times that amount with data compression.
Technology Benefits
The ability to make use of tape for data archiving tape has allow the center to minimize disk-related technology issues, such as dealing with the significant amount of heat that would be generated from additional spinning disks.At the same time, the use of tape enables the fMRI Data Center staff to avoid the complicated networking and administration issues associated with managing additional disk products in a SAN environment.