King Abdulaziz Foundation for Research and Archives (Darah)

Saudi Arabia

"QSAN XCubeNXT 8016D Storage offers us scalable storage with the ability to scale to several petabytes for future capacity requirements, high performance, data encryption, ransomware protection and enterprise class features at an affordable price with spares on site for immediate break fix and an extremely low cost of maintenance."

Adel Rabeh Al Harbi, Head of IT Department

Company Biography

King Abdulaziz Foundation for Research and Archives (also known as Darah) serves history, geography, literature, and heritage of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the Arab countries, and the Islamic countries, in general. Also, it preserves and collects the sources of the Kingdom history. It includes the King Abdulaziz Memorial Hall and King Abdulaziz Private Library. The Darah mainly involves in collections management and preservation of documents and archives pertaining to King Abdulaziz, the first monarch of Saudi Arabia, his successors, and the national history in general.

The Challenge

As the custodian of National history and records, Darah had exponential data growth, like organizations responsible for preserving and archiving data for long term. This necessitated a storage that could help them with their digitization goals in a cost-effective manner. Darah had a legacy system of about 500 TB and an assessment of the expansion of the same rendered it very expensive both in terms of capacity and maintenance. Besides, being a legacy storage, it also had severe performance impacts with frequent maintenance requirement and consequently, concerns regarding the upkeep of the data itself.

The Solution

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Forefront Technologies after studying the requirements suggested the QSAN XCubeNXT 8016D to connect with the existing Cisco switch at Darah. XN8016D delivers enterprise class storage featuring up to 4,096 Snapshots, thin provisioning, deduplication, SSD Caching, Auto Tiering, Replication, Pool Encryption, and support for CIFS / FTP / NFS / iSCSI / FC. The storage delivers superior performance with 256 GB RAID Cache and 4 optional host HBA for various connectivity options. Additionally, the ability to expand the system up to 9.3 PB of storage using JBODs, helps meet future expansion needs. The active-active controllers with cache mirroring ensure zero data loss even in the event of a controller failure. Besides, the ability to carry out system updates and upgrades on the fly, eliminates down time and allows for scheduled maintenance. The WORM volume enables the system to ensure compliance with retention times and accidental data deletion. Snapshots, facilitate data protection and point in time recovery of data and protection against ransomware. Integration with Windows ACL allows for a transparent file sharing environment. The SMTP alerts ensures advanced notification of system status.

The Benefits

Overall QSAN Storage provides an enterprise level storage with no additional licensing cost and a very small service renewal cost as compared to some of the other enterprise storages.